Leather and Lockets
by JadeEye
Summary: EightofSwords latest work....you may be surprised! Sorry about the mistake. Chapters 3-5 are now up!
1. Chapter 1

_**LONG**_** A/N:** This is one of those stories that I'd never thought I'd write. Aside from the blanket scenario, this is probably the most overdone story premise in all the fandoms: the _"(Insert Heroine's Name Here) is a sheltered schoolgirl, but then she meets (Insert Bishounen's Name Here), the bad boy leader of the (Insert Gang Name, Usually 'Wolves' or Something Equally Lame, Here) gang. What happens when they fall in love?" _story premise.

I avoid reading these stories, much less writing them. So it was rather INCONVENIENT when I heard the song "Leader of the Pack," and it rammed an image of a bad-boy Darien in leather with gelled hair and a tattoo leaning against a motorcycle into my brain. It was also INCONVENIENT that the story champed its clichéd teeth into my brain smack dab in the middle of IB exams. By the time I had thirty pages of it written (still during exams, mind you), there didn't seem to be any reason (other than INCONVENIENCE) not to finish it, so here it is. It's set in AU; there's no Senshi, just the characters set in present-day.

A big dollop of gratitude, as always, to Jade-eye, without whom STC and all my other stories would never have come to be!

Disclaimer: I don't own Sailor Moon, Spiderman, Girl Guides, or Pokemon. How INCONVENIENT.

L

Leather and Lockets

One

L

"Do you have your cell phone?"

Serena slipped her hand into her pocket and felt the familiar slim shape of her cell phone. "Yes, Daddy," she called back into the dining room.

"Then have a good practice. Tell Seiko I'm counting on him to beat Moto's quarterback's goals this Friday night!"

"I will." Serena closed the door behind her, locking it, and began jogging the four blocks to school and cheerleading practice. There was an ugly purple bruise on her thigh from falling from the top of the pyramid yesterday, and she wanted to change into her uniform before any of the other girls got there so that they wouldn't see it. If Coach Kitashiro knew how many injuries Serena was sustaining as the apex of the pyramid, she might switch her with Kim, and then Serena's mother would be crushed. She'd been top of the pyramid in her high school cheerleading days, and she had been so happy when Serena had won the same position.

Barely had Serena arrived in the locker room, panting slightly, than her cell phone buzzed against her hip. She pulled it out and flipped it open. "Hi, Daddy."

"Are you there yet?" he asked.

She pictured him standing at the window in the dining room, looking out over the bustling street. "Yes, Daddy, I got here fine."

"Good. Do a good job out there today."

"Thank you. I will."

"Bye, dumpling." He hung up.

Serena returned the phone to her pocket and retrieved her uniform from the laundry room. Lifting her bruised leg to climb into the pleated red skirt hurt, but she could handle it, she told herself, stretching the injured limb gingerly.

After putting on her uniform, she took off all her jewelry. She removed her earrings and then unclasped her necklace. Her parents had bought the expensive 24-karat gold locket for her seventeenth birthday several months ago, and she knew that they would be devastated if she lost it, so she tucked it very carefully into her bag. There was a speck of dirt on the locket, she noticed, and reminded herself to rub it off later.

Her decessorizing complete, Serena laced up her regulation blue and red tennis shoes and pinned her long blonde hair streamers into loops. Then she walked out onto the field to sit in the bleachers and wait for practice to begin.

As the cheerleading team trickled out to practice, so did the American football team. Seiko and his friends Hanzo and Kazuya were the first out, and they came to sit with Serena in the bleachers.

"Hey, you." Seiko hung an arm over her shoulders. The heavy shoulder pads of his uniform pushed into her neck like a misadjusted headrest. She shifted away as inconspicuously as she could. "How's my favorite girl?"

Serena used to blush at his flirtations. Now, only a faint pink touched her cheeks. Looking for a change in subject, she said quickly, "My dad says he's counting on you to beat Moto's quarterback Friday night." She injected pep into her voice. "Should be easy for you, right?"

Seiko leaned back, removing his arm from her shoulders to stretch leisurely. Then the arm was back down again, the shoulder pad heavier against her neck than it had been before. "What do you think, boys? Can I do it?"

Then, without waiting for an answer from Hanzo or Kazuya, he glanced at Serena. "Maybe if I have some motivation," he said. "How 'bout if I do it you come with me to Tanaka's party afterward?"

Serena put on a rueful smile. "I really don't think my dad would let me – "

"Baby, if I beat Moto's monster, he wouldn't say no if I asked to take your MOM to the party!" Seiko flashed his white teeth at her, laughing. "I'll just promise to take good care of you."

He was entirely right, Serena knew. Anything else, even a trip to the mall with her friend Mina (before she had moved away), her father heed and hawed at. But if it was Seiko's idea, then full steam ahead, by all means!

"So?" said Seiko. "Deal?"

She forced a smile. "Sure. Why not?"

L

After the conversation with Seiko and two and a half hours of falling off the pyramid onto her bum leg, Serena felt like a piece of gum that had been chewed up, spat out on the sidewalk, and stepped on by a million feet. This analogy did little to cheer her up – however, it did put her in mind of candy. The thought of a chocolate bar, oozing nougat and caramel into her mouth, filled her with longing. There was a candy shop not two blocks away from school. If she waited until after she went there to call her dad to tell him she was coming home, he would never know the difference.

She saw her reflection in the storefront as she crossed the street to the shop. She looked as tired as she felt, wearing her ancient velour tracksuit with the unraveling hems and bleach spatters, her hair a curly frizz around her pale, big-eyed face. And she was limping – just slightly, but enough to tell. She sighed.

A bell jingled on the door as she pushed it open. The sweet scent of the hundreds of candies rushed past her like a crowd of laughing children. The woman behind the counter looked up and smiled. Serena smiled back. Then she entered the maze of shelved that towered above her head, certain that she would end up getting more than just one candy bar – and not caring a whit. Even if it did mean that she'd gain ten pounds and be unable to fit in the set of winter outfits that she had bought for her visit to Mina's house in America next month.

Four aisles later, she held two of the dark chocolate, nougat and caramel Cloud Nine bars that she had come in for, along with a handful of dark chocolate truffles and three flavors of licorice. She was trying to keep the truffles from spilling out of her arms when she turned the corner and saw him.

He stood in front of the sour gummies, his hands in the back pockets of his faded black jeans, rocking back on his heels. He wore a polished black leather jacket that didn't shine nearly as much as his night-black hair did. He was beautiful – and with his leather jacket, silver earring, and the tattoo that she could just glimpse on the side of his neck, he looked exactly like the very type of man that her father was always afraid would snatch her right off the street.

At the second of this realization, her truffles tumbled out of her slack arms. They rained to the floor in a flurry of crinkling in their plastic wrappers. She froze, torn between hotfooting out of the store and picking up the truffles to continue her shopping expedition as though the sight of the beautiful delinquent hadn't ruffled her a bit. If she ran, he might chase her – he was turning to look at her even now – but she might be faster, she _was_ the quickest runner on the cheerleading squad – and if she stayed here, he would certainly –

He smiled.

All the terrified thoughts of turning up in a ditch two days from now dropped out of her head. His smile wasn't dangerous at all, it was kind and sympathetic, even a little teasing, and he was coming closer! he was kneeling! He was –

Picking up the truffles that she had dropped.

"Oh!' she heard herself squeak. She dropped quickly to her knees. Except that she was wearing her slippery velour tracksuit, with no traction, and her knees slid right across the slippery linoleum floor, and she went with them, her face bonking right into the man's chin.

An involuntary moan of dismay escaped her. She scrambled backward quickly.

"Careful," she heard him say, laughing, "you wouldn't want to smush any of the truffles."

Serena blushed horribly, not looking at him. "I – I'm sorry," she stammered. "I didn't mean – I should have had a basket for all this – "

"More like a cart," he said teasingly. "That's all of them. Are you ready to check out, or did you want to see how much more you could fit in your dainty little arms?"

He'd called her dainty!

He'd also asked her if she was ready to check out – which sounded very much like an employee. Serena regarded him with new eyes, reaching vainly after her sweets as he sauntered up to the front of the store and deposited them on the countertop.

"Um – thank you very much – " Serena said, trying to look inconspicuously for his nametag so that she could find out his name. Dimly, she heard the beeps of the cashier ringing up her purchases and handed over the money.

"No problem," he said. She could _feel_ his grin in his voice, it seemed. But where was his name tag…

"Excuse me, sir, could I help you with anything?"

Serena's eyes flicked to the clerk. The woman was speaking to _him_. Which meant – her face flamed like an ignited match – he DIDN'T work here! And she'd let him pick up her things and carry them like a servant – !

With another barely audible squeak of mortification, she darted out the door.

And of course, not three steps outside, she tripped. With a half-squeak, she just managed to catch herself on her hands, her bottom jutting into the air without dignity. _Please _let him not have seen that…

"Are you okay, lady?"

Serena looked up. A bouncy-haired boy crouched in front of her, his arms around his knees.

"Um," she said. She scrambled to her feet, rubbing her hands down the soft velour of her pants, trying to stop the stinging of her cement-burned palms.

"Um," she said again. "I'm…okay."

The kid blinked at her. Then his eyes flicked to her side, where she held her bag of candy. His eyes flicked just as quickly away, and he stood up.

Serena watched him, standing up herself. She hadn't missed the way his eyes went to her candy. Now she could see that the boy's shirt had a thready hem, his jeans had holes at the knees despite the autumn chill, and the soles of his tennis flapped on the sidewalk.

"Um," she said, digging into the bag. "Do you like Cloud Nine bars?"

The eyes that the boy shot her were first startled, and then narrowed with suspicion. Serena sensed her attempt at sharing falling on its face as rapidly as she had been a moment ago.

Quickly, for the man in the leather jacket would be coming out at any moment, she said, "I kind of bought this one on accident. I don't like them. Do you?"

The boy's eyes flicked up to her again. "You're sure?"

"I'm sure."

"Okay." He took the bars from her hands. His hands were calloused and small. "Thanks."

At that moment, Serena's cell phone vibrated against her hip. She jumped, and then said a hurried, "Bye!" to the little boy before running down the street toward home.

She jammed the phone to her ear. "Hello?"

"Isn't practice over yet?" asked her father's voice.

Serena wet her lips for a lie. "Yeah, just a few minutes ago," she said. "I'm walking home now."

L

Serena fell from the top of the pyramid during the halftime routine at Friday night's game against Muto. In front of fifteen hundred people – including her mom and dad.

She barely lasted a second at the top – her bruised leg began to tremble uncontrollably, and she toppled down. All she sustained was a few more bruises, but she landed on Rei Hino's leg and broke it.

Serena felt horrible as she sat with her teammate in the infirmary. Rei was crying and shooting her dirty looks. But she felt even worse when her parents came in after the game finished.

"That was quite a fall you took," said her mother mildly, eyeing Rei. A group of their teammates had surrounded her. "What happened? You've never had trouble staying up before."

"I hurt my leg," said Serena. "I didn't realize how badly it hurt."

"Mind over matter, sweetheart." Her father sat on the infirmary bed next to her and clapped her on the shoulder. "You know that."

"Yes, Daddy." Serena heard Rei's group of people mutter something that sounded like her name.

"Well here's some news that'll cheer you up." Serena's father stood up. "Seiko kicked the butt of Muto's quarterback!"

"Did he?" Serena smiled a cheerleader's smile. "Great!"

"And he asked me if he could escort you to a team celebration party tonight," continued her father. "He's a nice boy! So put tonight's mess behind you, and go support Seiko and the team!" He ruffled her hair. "Just make sure that Seiko gets you home by one, huh?"

"Um," began Serena. Maybe she could tell them her leg hurt too badly. Her mom would want her to rest her leg so she could get back to the top of the pyramid, wouldn't she?

But then Seiko entered the infirmary, his hair still dripping from the shower. The girls around Rei went quiet momentarily, a few sighs audible in the sudden silence. Then Serena's parents went to talk to him. Serena's mother waggled her eyebrows at her over Seiko's shoulder. Serena forced a smile back, cringing internally at the angry murmur that rippled through the Rei group a few feet away.

"Your dad's great." Seiko came over. "Told you he'd be cool with it! Now let's go!"

L

Tanaka-sempai's house was located across town, in the fringes of the seedy, gang-frequented district known as Roppongi. But his parents were on vacation and alcohol was flowing freely, so the less-than-opulent surroundings were disregarded.

"Awesome!" Seiko shouted to her over the din of the thumping music. He grabbed two plastic cups of beer from a table, gulping one down and thrusting the other at her.

"No, thank you," said Serena.

"WHAT?" Seiko shouted over the music.

"NO THANK YOU!" Serena shouted, shaking her head and pointing at the cup.

Seiko shrugged and downed the cup himself, reaching for another. He sipped from it as he placed his hand around her waist and steered her into the living room to where Hanzo stood with Arina, a dark-haired girl on the cheerleading squad.

Arina eyed Serena as the boys began to talk to each other. "Why'd you come to the party if you're so badly injured you can't stay at the top of the pyramid?"

There was no good answer to this question. Serena just shrugged uncomfortably, putting on an appropriately apologetic expression, and looked around the room from beneath her lowered lashes. The room was growing steadily more crowded with sweaty, dancing teenagers and even some people who were definitely out of high school.

One of these such guys, the collar of his polo shirt turned up, caught her eye and made a beckoning motion at her with his finger.

Anxiety swamped her stomach; she hurriedly flicked her eyes back to Arina. Two more of their teammates had joined her, girls who had been at Rei's bedside.

"Good job benching our best tumbler for the rest of the season," Suzuka said. "You just lost us our chance at regionals."

Serena bit her cheek. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it." She had apologized to Rei and to Coach. But she really owed the whole team an apology, for it hadn't been just Rei and Coach that her fall had hurt. "I really am. It won't happen again."

Arina rolled her eyes. "Sure it won't."

Serena didn't say anything. Eventually the girls stopped paying attention to her and began talking among themselves. Serena took advantage of their inattention to drift away. It required entering the sweaty crush of the dance floor, but anything was better than suffocating in the animosity emanating from her own teammates.

A hand grabbed her arm. "Going somewhere, gorgeous?" The older guy from before leaned down toward her. Sour alcohol breath swept into her face, and his hand was sliding further up her arm. Serena shoved it away.

"Let go," she said, embarrassed by how much her voice shook.

"Don't be mean." He pushed himself closer, and there were people pressing in on Serena on all sides, grinding, laughing, totally ignorant and uncaring of her plight. She felt herself suffocating.

"Hey!" A girl squeezed her way into the crush. Her cheeks were flushed, her lipstick smeared. She grabbed the man's shoulder and looked at his grip on Serena's arm, then at Serena. "Back off, bitch!"

Serena ran. She tumbled, breathless, through the crush of people, out into the cooler air of the street, pounding down the pavement, running, running, trying to escape the feeling of being slowly smothered out of her own body.

When she stopped running, she didn't know where she was anymore.

She turned slowly in a circle, taking in her surroundings and trying to glean a clue from them. It was sometime past ten o'clock, the sky too cloudy for her to find any stars to follow. The street was dark except for the few working streetlamps, their glass broken, and the neon signs flickering in the fronts of a cigarette store, a club thumping the street with music, a gas station with plastic bags flapping over the gas pumps. Shadows moved across the street, down the sidewalk, dim orange cigarette ends bouncing along with them in midair like fireflies.

If she had felt panicked before, that was nothing to now. Before, the people around her had been crushing her body. Now her very lungs felt as though they were being crushed, every molecule of oxygen squeezed from every cell of her body by panic. She backed slowly away from the street until her back hit a wall. She felt for her cell phone at her hip.

Then, for a moment, her shaking hands hesitated.

Would her father believe her explanation of how she had ended up alone in Roppongi? Did she even want to tell him about the man, about the party? He would want to know where Seiko had been; where her friends had been, and he would find out that party had been no fun-and-games team celebration but instead a full-blown kegger. And he would never let her speak to any of them again, and she would be totally, irreversibly alone…

She began to return the phone to its holder. But her shaking fingers lost their grip, and the phone went spinning across the sidewalk. It clattered open on the cement a few feet from her, its lit screen as bright as a flare gun in the darkness. Serena watched, frozen in horror, as a shadow leaned down to pick it up.

"You drop things a lot, don't you?" The shadow snapped her phone shut, extinguishing the brief play of light that had lit its face. Serena blinked rapidly, trying to make out that face that she could have SWORN she'd seen in the brief light.

"Um!" she stammered.

"And as articulate as ever." The shadow laughed.

With the warmth-pooling sound, Serena knew for sure what she had seen – the face of the leather-jacket man from the candy store.

Her anxiety lessened, then burst back in full force as she remembered that he actually hadn't been an employee at the shop and that he had a tattoo and that he was on _this _street at _this _time of night –

"Um," she said faintly. "How do you do?"

His shadowy form took a step closer, holding her phone out to her. "You alright?" he asked.

Then he stopped, his hand with the phone in it falling back to his side. "Wait." He grasped her by the shoulder and pulled her to one side, into the meager circle of light shed by a streetlamp. Serena stared up at him, her eyelids fluttering involuntarily against the sudden increase of light.

His face was more masculine that she remembered. She had beautified the image in her memory, lingering on his long dark lashes and blue eyes and high, sharp cheekbones. But now those eyes were narrowed and shadowy, his brows thick and dark, his cheekbones forgotten in the clench of his jaw.

"Did someone do something to you?" he demanded.

Serena gaped. How did he know? The man had only grabbed her arm… Then she became aware of several damp spots on her clothing pressing against her skin and of the sour smell of alcohol. She looked down at her skirt and blouse and saw the wet spots across them. Now she remembered fighting through the crowd at the party, people's beers sloshing out onto her as she squeezed through them.

"Um, no," she said. "I mean, it's not what it looks like – "

"Hey, Shields!" came a shout from across the street suddenly.

Serena looked up, stiffening, as the man in front of her called back, "Not now!" Then he looked at Serena. "Look, come with me."

_'Stupid!'_ Serena's brain screamed at her as she trotted along after the leather-jacketed man, led by his arm around her shoulder. _'What are you DOING? Kick him! Scream!'_

Serena dug her heels abruptly into the sidewalk. She barely dented the leather man's momentum; he kept walking and half-carried her along.

"I'm not gonna to do anything to you," he – Shields – said impatiently.

_See?_ Serena told her brain.

'_Yes, because people from Roppongi are so truthful!' _her brain retorted.

Serena recognized the wisdom in this statement; for all that this Shields man seemed so nice. She was about to make another bid for freedom when he veered them suddenly into the doorway of a dark storefront. He stood between her and the street, his legs slightly apart, his back to her, one hand beneath his jacket.

"Whassa got there, man?" slurred a voice from outside the doorway. Serena peeked under Shields's leather-clad arm to see a mohawked man in a wifebeater leering at her. It was the same look as the man at the party had worn on his face, and Serena felt the familiar nauseated wringing of her stomach again.

"Back off," Shields said.

"Eh, I don't think so…"

It happened so quickly that Serena barely saw it. Just a twitch of the man's shoulder blade in front of her nose, and the drunken mohawked man was sprawled out on the pavement, blood streaming from his boot-printed nose.

"_Now_ do you believe I'm not gonna do anything to you?" said Shields to her. He wrapped an arm around her shoulder again and set off down the street again at so quick a pace that she stumbled.

Quite soon, they reached another empty storefront with papered windows. He pulled her inside. Serena's brain was screaming at her.

The front room was empty and dark; she tripped and nearly fell, hissing as her bruised leg hit something hard.

"Sorry," he said into the darkness. He sounded sincere. Then there was a squeak of a door opening in the darkness, and they were in a room lit by buttery lamps and a fire crackling in a fireplace.

"Hey, Dare – what the hell?"

There were several couches around the room, facing the fireplace, stuffing poking out of them. Two people sat on them, one a guy who had jumped off the couch when he spotted Shields.

Now he jumped back, crouching on the armrest of the couch like Spiderman, his eyes wide beneath the bandana tied ninja style around his curly blond hair. "Who's this?"

Shields's arm wasn't around her shoulder anymore. He'd moved away, walking toward the couches. Serena held her arms straight and stiff against her sides. Her brain was silent.

"Yeah, Darien, who is this?" The other occupant of the room, a girl seated in an armchair, leaned forward. Her long arms dangled over her even longer legs, and she was glaring at Shields.

"Not what you think," said the man – Darien – suddenly curt. "Can you go get her into some other clothes, Lita? There's alcohol all over her."

The girl, Lita, shot Serena another look. Serena found herself returning it instead of flinching away. The girl had green eyes that glowed like jewels in the firelight, and Serena couldn't tear her eyes away.

Then the girl stood, and Serena realized that she was even taller than her father. She was as long and muscular and buxom as a Barbie doll.

"Um!" Serena heard herself blurt out suddenly. "I'm Serena! Serena Tsukino! Please call me Serena!" She bowed quickly.

'_Serenaaaaaaa!'_ Her brain wailed. '_Why would you DO that_ – '

Darien and Lita were looking at her with raised brows. Then Darien burst out into that laugh again.

"Well, Serena, I'm Darien. Darien Shields. And this is – "

" – all very nice," Lita finished, throwing him a strange look. "But that alcohol smell's really starting to make me sick. C'mere, kiddo."

Serena followed Lita down a hallway into a bathroom.

"Take a shower and get rid of that smell," Lita told her. "No one'll walk in on you but me. And I don't swing that way. I'll be back with some clothes." She shut the door behind her.

Serena turned to face the shower. It took her several tries to turn it on, the controls were so old, and there didn't seem to be any hot water, just cold. She didn't want to use all the shampoo washing her hair, so she tried to keep it from getting wet and just scrubbed her skin instead.

Lita returned just as she was wrapping an old and holy but clean-smelling towel around herself.

"I doubt any of this'll fit you real well," she said. "But short of having you try on something of Buji's, there wasn't much of an option. Try these."

It was a t-shirt and a pair of jeans. They were three sizes too big for Serena and hid most of the curves that her mother had tried so hard to bring out with the clothes that she bought for Serena. Yet Serena felt strangely safe in the baggy clothes that made her feel like a middle-schooler. She finished rolling up the pants three times and cinched the belt that Lita had brought.

"Thank you," she said, bowing again. "I'm very sorry to make so much trouble."

"Hmph," said the brown-haired girl. The clothes were clearly hers, since she was wearing an identical pair of holy jeans and a t-shirt. Like the blond boy, she wore a blue bandana, hers knotted around her ponytail. "What happened to you, huh?"

Serena looked up, not understanding at first. Then she saw her still-damp party outfit, sitting in a heap on the cracked tile of the floor.

"Um," she said, "It's kind of a long story."

Lita folded her arms, leaning against the sink. "I've got time."

"I was kind of at this party," Serena began to explain.

"Kind of at it?" Lita repeated, her lips quirking.

"Well, I didn't want to be there," elaborated Serena. "So my body was there, but my head wasn't. So only half of me was there. Hence, kind of at it." She realized suddenly what she was saying and stopped. Babble like this was why she didn't have any friends on the cheerleading squad. "Sorry. Never mind."

"No, go on."

"Well, I was there…"

"Kind of," supplied Lita.

Serena smiled self-consciously. "Yeah. But there were these girls who don't like me very much, so I was trying to get away, but this guy on the dance floor wouldn'tletgoofmeuntilhisgirlfriendcameandshewasmadand – " Serena sucked in a breath. "I ran. And ended up lost. He, um – "

"Darien," Lita supplied again. Her lips weren't quirked anymore.

"Yeah, he found me. We met before, you see, at the candy store – "

"Ah." Lita's expression was suddenly knowing. She nodded. "You were the one who gave Buji the candy, huh?"

"Um," said Serena. "Is Buji a really cute brown-haired boy with gorgeous curls?"

"More like the spawn of Satan, but yeah, basically."

"Oh," said Serena. "Then yes, I gave him the candy."

"I see," said Lita. "And here you are now. Well, c'mon back out, and we'll figure out what to do with you."

Serena followed her out, suddenly feeling self-conscious all over again. The clothes were really comfy, but she wanted to look pretty in front of him – Darien. Even if there was no way –

"What the heck, Lita, did you give her a sex-change operation too? She looks like a ten year-old boy!"

At the sound of the blond boy's voice, Serena's cheeks turned pink.

Lita punched him, and then planted her foot on his chest. "Ignore this moron, Serena," she said. "He's so insecure in his own gender that he jumps at the chance to question anyone else's."

"How unusually perceptive of you, Lita." This voice belonged to Darien Shields, and Serena spun to see him unfolding his long frame from the armchair closest to the fireplace.

He smiled at her gently. "She's right. Don't listen to Asanuma." He glanced then at Lita, whom Serena watched make a tiny, barely perceptible shake of her head.

He transferred his dark eyes back to Serena. In the dim lighting, his eyelashes looked longer than ever.

"Buji will kill me for not keeping you to meet him, but I've got a thing I've got to get back for." He pulled a ring of keys from his jeans pocket with long, graceful fingers. "And I imagine you're eager to get home after the night you've had?"

"Um." Serena wasn't quite certain how to respond. Lita had seemed very nice, if not extremely talkative, and even Asanuma, mouth-y as he was, reminded her of the teasing way that Mina's stepbrother had treated Mina. And then of course there was this man, this kind Darien…

"_I've got a thing I've got to get back for."_

She snapped back. Of course. They were busy doing whatever they were doing, and she'd stumbled into their schedule.

"Yes, of course," she said. She bent and bowed again, hands pressed tightly together. "Thank you very much for everything! If you could give me directions to the subway station – "

"Nonsense." Darien flipped his keys up into his hand with a final-sounding clink. "I'll take you home. C'mon."

"Um." Serena glanced back over at her shoulder at Lita, feeling like a kindergartener leaving her mother to follow the teacher on the first day of school. What should she do?

Lita cocked her eyebrow at her. "Go on," she said. "He only bites candy bars."

Serena nodded timidly and made to follow.

"Oh, and Serena?"

Serena looked back again.

The grin that Lita flashed her showed her teeth, glowing white in the dim light. "Stay away from those parties from now on, huh?"

Serena nodded once, twice, then scurried into the darkness after Darien.

The lights switching on suddenly surprised her eyes again, and she shielded them with a sleeve-swaddled hand.

"You really are a creature of the night, aren't you?" said Darien's voice with that laugh again.

Serena lowered her hand, smiling timidly in return, and took in the room. It was clearly a garage, scattered with wrenches and screwdrivers and various chunks of metal disgorging wires. In the center of the oil-stained concrete floor stood two motorcycles. Shields-san swung a leg over the smaller of the two, a sleek black model that gleamed almost as brightly as his midnight hair – the hair that he then covered with a helmet.

He slid the dark visor up. "Come on," he said, his voice slightly muffled.

"Um," Serena blurted out. "My dad says motorcycles are death magnets!"

"Your dad is right," said Darien, his eyes flickering suddenly. Then he leaned over and pulled up another helmet. "However, it's all I've got. And I'm a very experienced rider, if that means anything. So…"

He watched her from beneath his visor expectantly.

Serena took a step forward. She took the helmet. It was unexpectedly heavy. She put it on, feeling bulky and stupid, then stood awkwardly, not sure what to do next. If this had been a movie, she would have climbed on –

"I get that an accident magnet like yourself needs protection even just to stand around, but the helmet's a lot more effective when you're _on _the motorcycle."

His almost…_affectionate? _(_'No, that's insane,'_ Serena's brain told her firmly) grin took any sting out of his words, but Serena flushed nevertheless.

She gripped fistfuls of the denim of Lita's jeans and cleared her throat. "Um. Where should I…?" She forced her hands to unclench from the denim and lifted them. _Please don't let him see how much they're shaking._

He leaned forward, grabbed her hand, and guided her to swing her leg over the motorcycle seat to sit behind him.

"And then," he said, not letting go of her hands. Instead he brought them forward to knot around his waist, his fingers carefully…_deliberately?_ ('_Be quiet, you silly girl_,' said Serena's brain) locking her fingers together one by one. Serena blushed horribly, her helmet's visor fogging from the mere heat of her cheeks.

"And _now_ we're ready to go," said Shields-san. He kicked up the kickstand, started the ignition, and revved the engine.

Serena stiffened and held on tighter without realizing it, then blushed harder. She tried to sit ramrod straight so that only her interlocked fingers actually touched him instead of her whole body gluing itself to him in a totally obvious way, but sitting up straight became impossible the second that the motorcycle roared out into the street – almost as though he wanted her to have to hug him tightly to hold on _('Shut UP, Serena Tsukino!_' her brain shrilled).

Nevertheless, the mad race through the streets sent Serena's blood pumping double-fast, like a thousand gazelles fleeing from her heart, from the synergistic combination of what seemed like a near-death speed and from having her body wrapped around such a beautiful guy – who was from this side of town, no less! She crossed her toes tightly in her heeled shoes, hoping that he couldn't feel her pounding heart.

Eventually, the streets around them grew more deserted and clearer, lined with closed shops and quiet residential streets; they had left the bad district behind. At this point, Shields-san finally slowed the motorcycle down.

"You still alive back there?" he asked. She heard his voice begin deep in his chest before it came out, a buzzing that tickled her cheek where it pressed against his warm jacket.

She realized suddenly that her teeth were chattering. She tried to lock her jaw, but she couldn't manage to stop them from clattering together.

"Y-y-y-yes!" she managed. "Th-th-th-thank you!"

At this, Shields-san slowed his motorcycle even further. The next thing Serena knew, they were pulling over onto the side of the road. Shields-san planted one foot on the asphalt and released the kickstand with the other. Then he turned around, twisting nearly one hundred and eighty degrees, to look at her.

She was still hanging onto him tightly from the wild ride, and she nearly slid off the bike as he turned before she realized what was happening. Hastily, she disentangled herself, but not quickly enough: the ground rushed quickly up to meet her –

"Oof!" She huffed as he caught her by the scruff of Lita's shirt, just in time. Dimly, she heard him apologizing for catching her like that, but the words sailed straight out her head when his warm hands closed around her waist and uprighted her on the motorcycle seat. She felt like a doll, and for the first time in her life, that didn't feel like a bad thing. She sat, her hands curled loosely around his wrists as his hands rested just above her hips, and stared up at him through the crack where her motorcycle visor had fallen down. His visor was still on, and she wished quite fervently that he could see his lively, laughing eyes one more time before he dropped her off at her house and she never saw him again. But instead, all she saw was her own shivering reflection in his black visor.

She heard him sigh. "Of course. Lita didn't give you a jacket." His warm hands left her waist; he reached up and began pulling his leather jacket off.

"N-n-no!" exclaimed Serena. "It's ok-k-k-kay – "

Then the heavy jacket settled upon her shoulders, and it was so warm that it cut off her sentence. Her body gave an involuntary shudder as she huddled into the warmth, so much like that of his hands…

"Well, arms in, go on," said Shields-san's muffled helmet voice. He pulled her arms through the sleeves, which had to be nearly half a foot too long for her.

Serena finally recollected herself. "No, Shields-san, I really can't take your jacket – "

"You're not taking it," he said, bumping her helmet with his. "You're borrowing it."

And he finally pushed his visor up, revealing his face. Then, apparently uncomfortable twisting all the way around, he swung his legs over the motorcycle and swiveled so that he was sitting facing Serena now, his knees touching hers in the diamond created by their legs. In fact, they were quite close… Serena swallowed. Thank goodness her visor was still hiding her face.

"Answer a question for me?" he asked, looking down at her with those eyes.

Serena swallowed again. She waited until she was pretty sure that her blushing had receded before she tugged off her own helmet, which had become rather stifling with all her hair crammed up in it. Her ponytails fell in a heavy mass down her shoulders as she pulled the helmet off; she placed it in her lap, between them.

"Shoot," she said, then widened her eyes as she realized the possible ramifications of the word. He was from Roppongi, after all…

But he seemed not to have noticed; indeed, he looked rather distracted by something.

He said, "Huh?" then, "Oh!" and blinked, the faint smile disappearing from his lips. "If you don't mind me asking, how did you end up…where and how you were?" Then he modified his question. "What I mean is, I just want to know – did anyone hurt you?"

Serena was shaking her head violently before he even finished talking, red touching her cheeks at the implication. "No, no! Really! I'm fine, Shields-san, it was just a stupid party. You shouldn't worry about me, please."

Shields-san's eyes were very dark as he leaned closer to her. Serena felt abruptly as though she was the string of a bow, sitting very tense and straight as he curved above and around her. She gulped and tried to think of something else. He was so close that the only two things she could stare at were his eyes or his lips, and the latter was out of the question – !

She tried to stare objectively into his eyes instead. She saw golden flecks in them. At first she thought that they were the reflection of her hair, but no, there really were little golden flecks in his dark irises.

Serena caught her breath as she realized this – then her eyes widened when she realized that it was not her own breath that she had sucked in but rather Shields-san's!

He made a little sound, half a laugh and half catching his own breath, and pulled away from her.

"I'm so sorry!" Serena cried, mortified. "I didn't mean to suffocate you!"

Shields-san burst out into laughter again. The whole motorcycle shook. Serena's legs shot out to brace herself against the ground, but she was too short to reach; her hands grabbed a fistful of his shirt instead to keep from toppling off.

His laughter stopped, and he leaned down again.

"Um, sorry," said Serena, uncurling her fingers. She wondered how many times in a day a person could apologize before it became meaningless.

Almost as though he had read her mind, Shields-san said, his eyes roving her face, "Stop apologizing for everything."

Then he leaned back again. "Really you're fine? Girls as pretty as you who end up drenched in alcohol usually aren't fine."

Serena's brow furrowed. Was he implying – "I didn't drink anything!" she exclaimed indignantly.

"Oh, I know you didn't." His eyes were twinkling for some reason. "You did have some of those truffles, though."

Belatedly, Serena realized that when she had inhaled his breath earlier, it had tasted of fresh mint – so he had inhaled hers, too?! Her face burned a blistering red.

He noticed. "Hey, hey." His fingers rested gently against her arm. "I just meant to find out if anyone did anything to you."

She shook her head rapidly, staring at the holes in the knees of his jeans instead of at his face. He had skinny knees.

"No. I ran away before anything happened – I always do," she added quietly, bitterly. She sighed, then shook her head and looked up at him.

He was staring at her. "So someone did try something?"

Serena's forehead creased. Why was he so concerned? For he was concerned: the intensity of his expression nearly scorched her.

"I – it was just some guy at a party," she said, recalling it and thinking shamefacedly that all that the guy had really said that he wanted to do was dance… she had overreacted. Like always. "He probably wasn't going to do anything. I just panicked because he was old, a college guy, and everything, and I ended up knocking drinks onto myself. That's all." She laughed a little, scratching her damp, curling hair and tried to change the subject. "And what about you, are you in college?"

Abruptly his eyes darkened. Serena noticed immediately and said, "I mean, I'm sorry – "

"Didn't I tell you to stop saying that?" He looked at her, threading his long fingers through his blue-tinted hair. "I'm nineteen. College age. I just haven't been able to – get around to it yet."

"Oh." Serena nodded. "You looked pretty busy back there…" She trailed off. Finishing with _'sitting on couches and lurking in dark streets and all that'_ didn't seem quite the respectful way to talk to your knight in shining armor. Unless – "Do you always run around rescuing stupid girls at night?"

The dark expression in his eyes vanished. He laughed again. She was really beginning to enjoy her ability to draw the sound from him.

"No, you're my first."

"You mean you didn't rescue Lita?"

He snorted. "Have you seen Lita? She can rescue herself."

"Yeah." Serena sighed, remembering with starry eyes Lita's willowy, powerful figure. "She's so cool."

"Hang on." His warm, calloused hand pressed suddenly to her forehead. "Do you have a fever? Because I think you just called Lita _cool _– "

"She is cool!" protested Serena, batting at his hand. "You guys all have these skewed perceptions of each other! Lita called Buji the spawn of Satan!"

"That's because he IS," said Shields-san. "And you've known us for all of an hour, so I don't think you're quite qualified to criticize our perceptions of each other."

"Yeah…" Serena felt herself deflate. He was right. They weren't her group. Her group was Seiko and the cheerleading squad.

And it was getting late, she realized. "Didn't you say you had something you had to do tonight?"  
"Uh – " He stared at her, his fingers drumming his helmet. "Yeah."

He hooked a grin at her before he put the helmet back on his head. "But don't think that this saves you from my attempt to convince you that there's no way that Lita's _cool_. The only one at our place possibly deserving of that title is me."

"I'm so sure," said Serena impishly from underneath her own helmet. And she knotted her arms around his waist quite casually this time, feeling not a whit of awkwardness as they traded banter and directions for the rest of the ride.

Shields-san grew quieter, however, as they drew nearer to her home, the houses growing larger as they sped down the streets, the fences higher.

They stopped in front of hers. Shields-san stopped the motorcycle.

"You live here," he said, his voice unreadable.

Serena looked up from pulling off the helmet, her hair tumbling out again. She looked at her house, visible above the wall and front gate, trying to see it through a stranger's eyes. "Yes?"

"I see," he said as she placed the helmet back on the bike. "Well, it was nice meeting you."

Serena blinked at his suddenly cool tone. But before she could say anything more, he revved the motorcycle's engine and tore down the street into the night.

Serena stared after him. '_Hmm,_' said her brain. '_Guess he doesn't like you so much after all, now does he_?'

"I guess not," whispered Serena.

Her breath made puffs in the cold air, but she felt quite warm, disappointment and confusion hot in her gut. She had thought – but she must have done something, must have acted too forward, or maybe he just hadn't even liked her in the first place; after all, everyone said that Seiko liked her, but he didn't act like Shields-san at all…

"Serena? Is that you?"

Serena spun around. Her father's figure was outlined in the doorway by the lamplight from the living room. Panic seized her; had he seen Shields-san?

"Seiko barely made it in time." Her dad walked down the front walk toward her. "It's twelve fifty-eight."

_Only twelve fifty-eight?_ thought Serena.

"Um!" she said. "We had a food fight, so Marisa lent me some clothes to wear home."

"Huh." Her father opened the gate for her and ushered her in. "I didn't realize Marisa was so much bigger than you."

"Well, some of them are hand-me-down's from her older sister." Serena belatedly remembered that she was still wearing Shields-san's leather jacket. "And this is Seiko's jacket. He gave it to me because it was cold."

"Isn't he a gentleman. Well, come in, it's late." he added, holding the door open for her

Serena nodded, scurrying inside. She flung a "Good night!" over her shoulder at her parents and raced up the stairs. She hurriedly shut her bedroom door behind her. Then she slid down it to sit on the floor and stared at her dark room.

Her heart was racing. She had just told a major,_ major_ lie to her father. Tentatively, she felt her nose. It felt the same size as ever, but she could not help but feel as though her falsehood was tattooed all across her face.

L

That night, before she went to bed and after she changed into pajamas, Serena took off Lita's clothes and Shields-san's jacket to carefully fold them and place them under her bed. The next morning, she went to Saturday morning cheerleading practice, where the coach sent her and her bruised leg to sit on the bench with Rei

She barely noticed the dirty looks that Rei shot at her; her mind was underneath her bed, on the neat stack of clothes.

She couldn't _not_ take them back. From the state of their living place, Lita and Shields-san didn't have a lot of money to be giving away clothes. And Shields-san's leather jacket had probably not only monetary value but sentimental value: insigniaed patches decorated its back and breast pocket. Probably he had earned those patches. She couldn't not return the jacket, especially.

But he had seemed so cold and distant when he drove away! Like he had never wanted to see her again. Serena clenched her fingers around the metal bleacher. She certainly didn't want to force herself in where she wasn't wanted.

'_And,_' her mind pointed out. '_Going there would mean lying to your parents again. _And_ walking through that district again. Would you even be alive to find their hideout again? Probably not before getting mugged or jumped or worse._'

Serena cringed.

"What is WRONG with you?" Rei broke into her thoughts. Serena looked up to see the other girl giving her a glare and moving further down the bench. "Could you at least TRY to act sane?"

"Sorry," Serena mumbled. Inside, she remembered how Lita and Shields-san had seemed amused by her – not disgusted. She thought of their beautiful smiles, their pretty eyes. She remembered something – two things. First, the blue bandanas that all three of them – Shields-san, Lita, and Asanuma-san – had worn. And second, that Rei's father was a police officer.

"Rei," she blurted out. "Are there any gangs in Roppongi?"

Rei snorted. "Are there any GANGS in ROPPONGI? Have you been living under a rock? Of course there are gangs in Roppongi!"

"But any – you know – whose members wear blue bandanas? Or have very young members – maybe a very young leader?" Serena bit her lip, hoping that she wasn't giving away too much.

Rei eyed her. "My dad has talked about a few like that," she conceded grudgingly. "There's one that has something to do with wolves or something. I haven't heard anything about who leads them, but I think they have blue bandanas. Clearly, they're stuck in the _eighties_." Rei flipped her hair. "Kind of like you. Please tell me those things you're wearing aren't legwarmers."

Serena fell back into thought without even flushing at Rei's words. If they really _were_ in a gang, that made them even more dangerous, didn't it? Except of course that they really had been so very nice to her, gang or not…

The clothes and the question of their owners haunted Serena all day long. The stack of clothing seemed to have a presence, lurking like a bogey monster under the dust ruffle of her bed. She couldn't concentrate on her homework, she couldn't read her manga; she even felt weird getting into bed that night, like the princess and the pea, acutely aware of their presence burning beneath her bed.

At last she sat up and snuck to the laundry room to put Lita's clothes in the wash. She left Shields-san's jacket sitting alone. It seemed even more intense on its own, its patched presence smoldering beneath her bed as she tried to fall asleep.

When she finally woke up on Sunday morning, eyes gritty, she decided that she could take it no longer. She put all the borrowed clothing in a bag and told her parents that she was going to Marisa's to return the clothes and maybe to bake cookies.

"Got your cell phone?" her dad asked.

"Yes, sir," said Serena. "I'll text you." She didn't want to risk her father hearing any possible noises in the background and realizing that she was not at Marisa's baking cookies.

"You kids and your contraptions." Her dad shook his head and went back to the Sunday crossword.

Serena locked the door behind her with an uneasy sense of finality. It might be the last time she saw her house, her family – her nerve faltered. She remembered the mohawked man who had approached her in Roppongi before Darien arrived. Was she really going to risk her life to return a few shabby articles of clothing to strangers who had probably already forgotten her? If Shields-san really wanted his jacket so badly, he could come get it –

Then Serena pictured her dad's reaction to finding a gangster on his doorstep asking for his daughter and discovering that his daughter had lied to him.

Yes, she decided. She would rather risk her life this way.

She went first to Tanaka's house, then tried to retrace her steps from Friday night, searching for landmarks. But it had been dark, and she had hardly been paying attention…

The futility of her insane attempt sank into her only when she was deep into the district. Nervously, she wished that she had stuck a pillow under her shirt, worn more layers, or _something_ to make herself look uglier, because the looks she was receiving from the men in the half-deserted Sunday streets were making her insides twist. And she was pretty sure that that shuffling pair of footsteps had been following her for too long to be coincidence…

She turned a corner around an abandoned gas station, about to break into a run. Then she saw a reddish-brown ponytail gleaming in the sun.

Serena's heart dropped nearly to her toes in relief. "LITA!" she shouted. "Lita!"

The ponytail turned, and Lita's green eyes fell on Serena's. Then they widened.

Several other people had turned to look, too, Serena noticed with a flush; she may have shouted a little too loudly. But she also heard the pair of footsteps pounding quickly away behind her.

"_Blondie_?" Lita stood in front of her. "What the hell – what are you doing here?"

"I brought," began Serena, but Lita grabbed her by the elbow, saying, "Never mind, let's get inside. Geesh, you couldn't have tried to ugly yourself up a little?"

"Well," said Serena as they turned down an alley filled with overflowing Dumpsters and a few tattered men sleeping among the trash bags. "I thought that, too, but not until I was already here, and then it was too late, and it's not like I'm really that pretty to begin with – "

One of the hoboes lying among the garbage stirred, sitting up. In a slurred voice, he said, "Hey, babies – "

"Shut up," said Lita coldly, pulling up the waistband of her jacket. Serena saw both a gleam of knife blade and a blue bandana winding through her belt loops. The man blanched and lay back down silently in the trash. Serena, also pale, wondered if it was the knife or the bandana that had prompted his reaction.

Lita led her down another alley.

"Um, Lita?" asked Serena after a moment, unnerved by the silence of the claustrophobic alley. "Why do you live here? If you don't mind me asking."

"Why does anyone live here?" Lita stared straight ahead as she walked. "Because we don't have anywhere else."

She stopped abruptly, and Serena saw that there was a door, half-hidden behind a Dumpster. She knocked, once, once, twice in sequence, three times in sequence, five times in quick succession –

"A Fibonacci sequence," said Serena, tilting her head in fascination.

Lita tossed her a look. "What?"

Serena blushed. "Nothing."

The door opened before Lita could say anything else – and it looked like she had been about to. Lita turned toward it.

"Kino," she said. "With a visitor."

"Not Buji?" said a voice from within. But the door opened the rest of the way; Lita pulled Serena in with her.

This time, the room into which the door led wasn't dark. Instead, it had a folding table with a deck of cards on it; apparently, the spiky-haired man with the blue bandana had been in the middle of a game of Solitaire. On the other end of the room, stacked in the corner, were dozens of white-wrapped packages.

"Isn't this an odd place for you to be babysitting, Kino-san?" said the man, eyeing Serena doubtfully. "Not to mention a big baby."

"Shut up," said Lita, although not in a mean way. "We'll be inside. Tell me when Dare gets here."

"Uh, I wouldn't, " began the man, but Lita had already opened the next door and pulled Serena in with her –

Serena squeaked and blushed, quickly averting her eyes. Shields-san stood shirtless in the middle of the room, his foot propped up on one of the chairs that encircled a table. Bandages wrapped around his ribs, and he was swabbing at his face with a reddened pad of gauze.

A moment passed, with no one saying anything. Tentatively, Serena lifted her eyes again. Shields-san was looking over at them, revealing a long red gash down the side of his face, almost intersecting his eye. His face was unreadable as a mask.

"Um," she began eloquently.

"Tsukino-san," he cut her off, lowering his foot from the chair and standing upright. She saw a edge of purple bruising peeking out from the top of the bandages around his abdomen. "To what do we owe the pleasure?"

"How did you get so hurt?" Serena's words tumbled out without thought. She had never seen such injuries in her life, even among the football players. Was that cut from a _knife_?

'_Are you surprised_?' asked her brain sardonically, pushing the memory of Lita's belt knife to the front of her mind.

Serena shook her head. "Are you okay?" she demanded.

Shields-san seemed nonplussed by this. His eyes flicked to Lita, who appeared to have suddenly found something very interesting in her fingernail cuticles.

"I'm fine," he said, dropping the gauze pad onto the table next to a half-empty bottle of antiseptic. "But I asked my question first."

Serena tried to hide the sting she felt from his cold tone; she stood up straighter, pulling the bag of clothes out of her backpack.

"I brought your stuff back," she said, addressing Lita instead of Shields-san. "I washed them. Except I didn't wash your jacket, Shields-san, because I didn't want to mess up your patches or the leather…"

She trailed off. Both Lita and Shields-san were staring at her now, their faces unreadable.

Uh-oh. Perhaps they hadn't wanted her to wash them…? Had she breached some unbreakable Roppongi protocol?

At last, Lita spoke. "You came here…to do that."

"Um." Serena shifted from foot to foot. "Yes?"

Now Lita turned to Shields-san. "And _you_ gave her your _jacket_?"

"Yes," said Shields-san, his inscrutable gaze on Serena.

Serena felt a flush crawling up her neck like a furry caterpillar. She cleared her throat and stepped forward, placing the bag of clothes on the table.

"So," she said, "I'll just be going now – "

"God, you're real, aren't you?"

Startled, Serena looked up at Shields-san. He was suddenly much closer. Her nerves afire, she didn't notice Lita stepping out of the room.

She stammered, "I – I don't understand the question. I…I _exist_. See?" She pinched her arm and showed him.

A chuckle trickled out of his lips. He shook his head, still staring at her. "You really came back into Roppongi just to give back our _clothes_?"

"Well," said Serena. "I thought your jacket was kind of like a Girl Guide vest with all those patches, and I thought you wouldn't like to lose it if you'd worked so hard to earn it – " She stopped; he was laughing again. Then she realized that she had just compared him to a Girl Guide, and she began to giggle, too.

"I think it's safe to say I've never been compared to a Girl Guide before," said Shields-san. He eyed her, his laughter fading. "Do you know who I am, Serena?"

"We-ell…" Serena rubbed her ankle with her other foot. She spoke slowly. "It seems like you're some kind of gang leader…but you don't seem very mean. And you don't have a beard," she added as an afterthought.

Again, he stared at her. "I don't have a beard," he repeated.

"Well," she said. "It's just, when I picture yakuza or mobsters, they always have facial hair. To make them all ugly to match their badness, you know. But you're really pretty – "

She stopped in horror again.

This time he wasn't laughing. He looked a little horrified himself. "_Pretty_?" he echoed.

She tried to salvage it. "Just because of your eyelashes. And your cheekbones. And, you know, your hair – " She stopped.

"So basically, everything." Shields-san sighed, pushing a hand through his hair, then winced as he accidentally touched his cut. "Great."

"You're still very manly," Serena offered earnestly. "With your jacket and your tattoo and your hands and now your scar and all."

"My hands?"

Serena avoided his twinkling eyes, her face a tomato of mortification.

'_Stupid,_' said her brain, shaking its head in disgust.

"Hmmm," said Shields-san. "You're very pretty, too, Serena."

Serena's eyes bulged. "Whaaaaat?"

He grinned at her. "What with your hair and your big blue eyes and your little hands and all."

Serena pressed her hands to her burning cheeks. She felt acutely how wide her 'big blue eyes' were. "Uh – uh – thank you, Shields-san. Uh, umm…"

He was frowning a little now. "Shields-san? Call me Darien."

"Ah – okay, Darien-san."

"No, no, no." He shook his head. "Repeat after me. Da-ri-en."

"Da-ri-en," she repeated obediently. Then she grinned. "San."

He rolled his eyes. "You're much more troublesome than you seem, you know that?"

"You're talking to ME about troublesome?" said Serena in disbelief, watching the small bead of blood welling from the bottom of his long cut.

"Touché." He grimaced, dabbing the cut with another gauze pad. His blue eyes unfocused for a minute, as though in thought; then they resharpened and bored into hers. "In fact, this is exactly why you shouldn't be coming here."

"But – " Panic tightened her chest. He had only just begun to tease with her again! "But I want to – to be friends! With you! And Lita!"

A silence followed her outburst. Shields-san – Darien watched her with his dark eyes, pressing the gauze to his jaw.

At last, he said, "Friends, huh?"

Serena bit her lip and nodded vigorously. "Yes!" Then, on a sudden stroke of inspiration, she blurted out, "And if you say I can't, I'm just going to come visit anyway!"

The smile that split his face was abrupt and dazzling.

"Will you now?" he said. "I believe you. Okay, Dumpling Head, we'll be friends."

Serena blinked, overwhelmed by the ease with which he had agreed. Then – "Dumpling Head?" she repeated. A scowl creased her face; she planted her hands on her hips. "Hey!"

The door suddenly flew open.

"Darien, why did NUMA pick me up – " The voice stopped short.

Serena turned and found herself face to face with the boy from outside the candy store.

"Oh!" she exclaimed. "Buji-san!"

"Lady!" said Buji, brown eyes round. He looked past her at Darien, then back at her again. "Do you have more candy bars?"

"Buji!" Darien cuffed him on the side of the head. "Were you raised in a barn?"

"No, I was raised in a dumpster," Buji retorted, sticking his tongue out at Darien. "Meanie-face. Why are you talking to him, onee-chan? He's way too ugly for you."

"Fine words from a boy who looks exactly like me," said Darien. "Serena, ignore my younger brother; his ego is the size of China."

Oh, they were _brothers_. Serena clapped her hands together, examining them each carefully. Yes, the resemblance was there, from the luxurious eyelashes and the dark hair to the stubborn jaw and matching eyebrows. A sudden aching yearning filled her, as she watched them bicker: if only she had a younger sibling.

" – sent Asanuma to pick me up!" Buji was complaining. "You know he always embarrasses me in front of the other kids! 'Did you know Buji used to have Pink Power Ranger pajamas?' he says. 'Buji's favorite Pokémon was Jigglypuff!' he says. And – "

"Well, it was, wasn't it?" The blonde boy from Friday night stuck his head into the room. "How's your face, Dare – " His eyes landed on Serena. "Oh! You came back to bask in my presence, I see!"

Serena giggled.

"No, don't laugh at him, onee-chan!" Buji exclaimed. "It's like feeding seagulls! Now he'll never leave!"

"Good God, you idiots are lucky there's no noise ordinance here." Lita entered the room. "Pipe down, Buji-brat."

"You pipe down, Lita-long-legs," Buji retorted. "They're all mean, onee-chan. Take me to live with you!"

And he stared up at Serena with such adorable huge brown eyes that Serena felt herself melting into a puddle of goo. Surely her parents wouldn't notice a little seven year-old living in the house –

"Hey, hey, hey, no hypnotizing the new girl!" Asanuma nudged Buji. "Not before I get my turn, at least."

"Okay," said Darien loudly, placing a hand on Serena's shoulder and steering her out of the way of the "thbb!"ing tongue-sticking-out fight that had broken about between Buji and Asanuma. "Time for Serena to escape this madhouse."

"Ah – wait!" Serena tried to spin around under his hands. "When can I see you all again?"

"We'll come see you, hmm?" said Darien. "Apparently you haven't noticed, but this isn't exactly the safest place for unescorted young girls." He saw her eyes flick over his shoulder to Lita. "We've already talked about Lita being the exception."

"Oka-ay," said Serena grudgingly. She chewed her lip, thinking. "What about Friday night? There's gonna be a bonfire after the football game. At Crow Park."

"Sounds good," said Darien.

Just then, someone else stepped into the door, someone Serena had not seen before. It was a tall, gangly man with light hair and freckles. He looked directly at Darien and held up a brown package.

"I've gotta go." Darien tapped one of her hair buns and stepped away, his face already going blank again, as it had before. "Lita'll take you home."

"Oh, will I?" said Lita. She stood near the newcomer now; she had been speaking intently to him. Now she came over to Serena. "Well, let's go, Sere-girl."

L

A/N: I've almost completely writing finished this three-part story. It's pretty long, and it takes up time that would otherwise go to STC, but like I said, it's inconvenient and won't let me go. I'm always looking for advice on how my writing is outside of STC, so PLEASE review this chapter, darlings.


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: Language warning. BIIIIG language warning.

Also, there is a sentence beginning with "At least" that will seem as though perhaps it was a typo and should have been "At last." It is not a typo; "At least" is correct. I'm slightly anal-retentive like that.

Three hundred gallons of love and thanks to Jade-eye! No one deserves it more than you.

Disclaimer: As usual, I only own Buji. And I don't think he even shows up in this chapter. Sob. Oh, and Seiko, I own him too. But he's not the type of child a mother likes to claim. Heheh.

L

Leather and Lockets

Two

L

Friday night could not come soon enough. Serena's brain warned her that it was not healthy to look forward so much to one thing, but she fairly floated through the week, concocting scenarios full of sparkle- and heart-laden dialogue, her and Lita declaring lifelong friendship, and Darien asking her to dance – although of course there wasn't really dancing at bonfires. Grinding, yes, and making out, yes – and other, stuff, yes – Serena flushed to the roots of her hair just thinking about it.

'He_ wouldn't blush_,' pointed out her brain. '_He's from Roppongi, remember? You think he hasn't done things like that scads of times before?_'

Only this thought managed to deflate Serena's elated reverie, and it happened at the most inconvenient time: while she was at the top of the pyramid again.

Boom! Down she tumbled, and was promptly sent back to the bench by her teeth-grinding coach.

"Back again," said Rei.

"Yes," said Serena, but her mind was occupied.

Call it wishful thinking, but she didn't think Darien was exactly typical Roppongi gang material. He'd had tons of chances to try anything on her already, if he had wanted to. But he hadn't. And he didn't talk the way that she imagined a violent delinquent would, with drawling and cursing and improper grammar all over the place. Not to mention, of course, the fact that he didn't have a beard. Or a mustache or an afro, or a Mohawk or even a head shaved bald. She shuddered. And when she'd mentioned college to him, he had seemed wistful – and what hardcore delinquent went to _college_?

That said, he did have gangster aspects to him. The motorcycle, for one, and his tattoo and his leather jacket and the bandanas and the suspicious packages and, of course, those injuries that looked as though they were from a knife-fight…

Serena stopped thinking, whirly-eyed. Okay, so maybe he was a gangster. But he was a _nice_, _smart_ gangster. With killer eyelashes.

'_Exactly!_' exclaimed her brain. '_**Killer**_!'

"That's not what I meant!" Serena wailed, digging her knuckles into her head."You're going schizo again," said Rei.

Serena sat up straight. "Sorry!"

"Sure you are." Rei rolled her eyes. She eyed Serena doubtfully for a minute. Then she sighed and tossed her hair. "Remember that gang you asked me about the other day?"

Serena blinked. "Y-yes?"

Rei tossed her hair again. "Well, I asked my dad about them. They call themselves the Wolves or something. He said they're pretty low-key. They operate at the south end of Roppongi around the elementary school there – hey! Are you even listening to me?"

"Y-yes! Intently!" stammered Serena, who had begun to stare into space, her brow furrowed as she tried to remember where in Roppongi she had been.

"Hmph," said Rei. "Well, anyway, the only stuff the police has busted them for is gang fights with other Roppongi gangs. Oh, and their leader is some young guy, a Fields or something – "

"Shields?" Serena blurted out.

"Yeah, that. Whatever. He seemed pretty tense about them, so if you're trying to, like, join them, or something, I would steer clear." She smirked. "Now this is the last thing I do for you, Bone Breaker, so don't ask again, okay?"

"Alright!" agreed Serena brightly. She bounced to her feet. "I've gotta go! Can you tell Coach I had to leave early, please? Thanks! Bye!"

She ran off, hardly limping.

"HEY!" Rei shouted after her. "I just said I WOULDN'T do you any more favors!"

Serena burst into the library and skidded to a stop in front of a free computer. The computer club, in a meeting at the other end of the room, whispered among themselves, but for once Serena didn't notice at all.

Rapidly she hunted and pecked to type 'Wolves, Roppongi,' into Google. Then, after a second's hesitation, she added, 'Shields' and pressed enter.

There weren't many relevant results. Three articles from the local newspaper, a Wikipedia article, and then a bunch of sites about some weird manga series featuring Barbie-proportioned girls who ran around in short skirts fighting youma. Serena had no idea what that had to do with gangs in Roppongi.

She read all the newspaper articles. Each one concerned gang activity in Roppongi within the past year.

The first article reported a bomb threat made on the Roppongi elementary school, Horibuchi Primary, by a north side Roppongi gang calling itself "Black Moon."

A link to another article was at the bottom of the page. "New Gang, Wolves, Respond to Black Moon Threat" was the second of the three articles that Google had yielded. This article, dated a week after the first, recounted police's discovery of a dozen Black Moon members beaten and tied-up in Horibuchi's playground. Several classrooms in the school had apparently begun to be vandalized. A note left at the scene and released to the press read, '_If the police won't protect the kids, the Wolves will._'

Only the last article actually mentioned Darien's name. It was a brief blurb, describing two police officers' breaking-up of a fight in Roppongi between three men only a few days before.

'_The fight was thought to be linked to gang activity,_' Serena read with widening eyes. '_Darien Shields, 19; Diamante Nemes, 23; and Safire Nemes, 21, were taken into custody early Sunday morning. Both of the Nemes brothers have been arrested for gang activity before, in addition to drug trafficking charges, while Shields was wearing a blue bandana, widely known as an identifying article of the Wolves, a Roppongi gang.'_

Serena sat back. That explained the injuries he'd had on Sunday! But why had he fought at all? The article had said nothing about that.

Yet Serena could guess – '_the rose-tinted version, of course_,' said her brain sourly. Buji was an elementary schooler; he probably attended Horibuchi. And if a gang had been threatening his little brother's school, of course Darien had taken actions to stop it! And what was wrong with that? Protecting your family was –

Something suddenly buzzed angrily against her. Serena jumped, knocking over her stool. Only as the entire computer club and the frowning librarian looked over at her did she realize that the buzz had been the vibration of her cell phone.

She hastily replaced the stool, logged off the computer, grabbed her bag, and hurried out the door. By then, her phone had stopped buzzing. She opened it as she ran onto the sidewalk. The screen blinked, "3 MISSED CALLS. CALLER: DAD CELL."

She had missed _three_ calls? She must have been so engrossed in reading…

Biting her lip, Serena dialed her father's cell phone number.

He answered on the first ring. "Where are you?" he demanded.

"School," answered Serena quickly.

"It is five-thirty," his voice enunciated icily. "Practice should have ended half an hour ago. Why are you still at school?"

Serena chewed on her cheek, hard. Another lie. "I had to do partner research in the library. I forgot to tell you, I'm so sorry – "

"Home. NOW." He hung up.

Serena folded her phone and slipped it back into its holder. She was in so much trouble.

L

"But – !" Serena stared at her parents in shock. She hadn't thought – she'd never thought that – "But that has nothing to do with me forgetting to call!"

"It has everything to do with it," said her father. "Visiting that girl was something you were looking forward to, and now that you've lost that privilege, maybe you'll think twice about being responsible."

'_It was one time!_' Serena's brain screeched. The pressure of the disbelief and betrayal and disappointment she felt squeezed tears from her eyes. She blinked angrily and scrubbed at them. Tears would do her no good.

She turned to her mother.

"Mom, please," she pleaded. "I'll do anything else, I'll do all the chores, I'll babysit Aunt Rumiko's kids, I'll do community service, I'll come straight home from the football games instead of going to the parties – "

Her mother laughed gently. "Darling, nonsense. It's important that you go to those parties for the team morale, not just for you." Serena chewed furiously on her cheek. "And you know, we always thought Mina wasn't the best influence on you. Without her father around and her mother dating that American – "

"Mom!" Serena cried, wide-eyed. Her eyes flicked to her father and found him nodding in agreement.

She felt like she was going to throw up.

"I – " She heard herself say. "I'm going to bed now."

And she did. She went to her bed and she lay in it, head smothered in her pillow, and felt even more like throwing up when she realized that she hadn't defended Mina to her parents.

L

Her ebullience at the prospect of seeing Lita and Darien had dimmed. She felt uneasy, jinxed, as though she should not like them so much, because when she liked people, they somehow left her life, like Mina had.

Friday arrived crisp, sunny, and cold. Serena shivered deeper into her sweater even in the bright sun as she shuffled out to the field after the dismissal bell rang. Her fingertips were numb as she dialed her father's number on the cell phone.

Her parents had become even more strict about her calls to them after her failure to call them that day that she had researched Darien. Since then, they had required that she call them when she reached school, at lunch, immediately after school, and at the end of cheerleading practice.

Tonight, they expected her to call before the game started, after the routine at half-time, when the game ended, when she got to the park where the bonfire would be held, and when the bonfire ended.

She finished telling her father that she was at cheerleading practice and hung up. Then she began her normal decessorizing to change into her uniform. As she removed her locket, she remembered the speck of dirt on it that she had meant to rub off.

To her surprise, there were more little gray sports on the gold than before. Cradling it in her palm, she rubbed at the largest of the spots with her thumb. Even when the friction between her thumb and the metal created heat on her skin, the dirt wouldn't come off. She began to scratch at it with her thumbnail.

At which point golden flakes began to come off on her thumb.

Serena's fingers fell away. She stared at the locket.

Then she began to rub harder. And harder, until the whole locket was naked and gray, and on the floor all around her there were little flakes of gold like fairy dust.

"Se_rena_! What IS all that crap?"

Serena jerked and stuffed the locket in her pocket. "I – I spilled something!"

Rei rolled her eyes. "Typical. Get ready, would you, Meatball Head?"

When Rei had hobbled back outside, Serena dug hastily into her backpack. Inside was a small kit of nail polishes. One was gold. With shaking fingers she unscrewed it and began to paint the naked locket. She couldn't let her parents find out that the locket on which they had spent so much money was fake.

She waited carefully for it to dry. Then she changed into her uniform and put the locket in her bag.

No sooner did she change into her uniform and emerge from the locker rooms than Seiko's familiarly heavy arm draped itself atop her shoulders like a python.

"Hey, baby," he said. "Save you a seat on the bus?"

That throw-up feeling roiled in Serena's stomach again. As the apex of the pyramid, she was usually kept back by Coach as the rest of the team boarded the bus in order to receive a few last-minute instructions. Which usually meant, unless someone was sick, that the bus seats were all full and Serena ended up sitting on Seiko's lap the whole way to the opposing school.

The football players thought it hilarious; the cheerleaders simmered with envy; and Coach thought that Serena preferred it that way, so sitting in Seiko's lap invariably became her fate on bus rides.

But the memory of the leering Roppongi man sleeping in the trash bags suddenly flashed into Serena's mind. She realized that he had said, '_Hey, babies_' with the same leer and innuendo-laden tone as Seiko when he said, "Hey, baby."

Lita had flashed a knife at the homeless man for leering at her like that. What was different about Seiko? He had a flashy football uniform instead of rags and he smelled nicer than a hobo – sometimes? And yet she, Serena, was going to sit in his lap and let him run his hands up and down her waist – _had_ let him, many times already?

Lita would be disgusted if she knew.

Shame and self-disgust filled Serena herself. She shrugged out from beneath Seiko's arm. "No."

"Huh?" Seiko held up a hand to her, gesturing at her to wait.

Her brow creased in incredulity; then she saw that he had his mp3 player ear buds dangling from his ears. Now that she saw it she could hear the too-loud music escaping from them, loud thumping rap. He pulled one blaring ear bud out.

Then he looked past her, paying her no attention at all. "Tanaka! Hey, man! Sweet party!"

'_We didn't even get the chance to make a striking exit!_' grumbled Serena's brain.

But Serena was glad. Despite feeling suddenly as strongly as she did that she never wanted to sit in Seiko's lap again, ever, she didn't want to ram headfirst into the argument right now if she could help it. There was a more peaceful way to solve the problem: she just had to get onto the bus before it filled up. Then she wouldn't have to sit on Seiko's lap, and he would get that it was over.

Hopefully.

Warm-ups and the squad's quick review of the routine were tense. This game would determine if the team advanced to district finals, and excitement crackled like a live wire beneath the girls' jumps, flips, and shouts.

Even Serena began to feel invigorated and lively, fueled by adrenaline from her decision to sit in her own seat on the bus and by the prospect of seeing Darien and Lita in only a few hours.

Coach had returned her to the top of the pyramid, and she climbed to the top flawlessly, balanced at the top flawlessly, and returned to the ground flawlessly, face stretched in a grin.

"Well done!" Coach clapped her hands once, twice. "Okay, everyone on the bus – " Serena edged to the fringe of the group, closer to the waiting bus. " – except Tsukino. I need to talk with you for a minute."

Serena's heart beat stuttered. "C-Coach!" Her voice sounded startled, as though shocked by her own audacity. "Can't – can't we talk when we get there?"

"Why, Serena, can't wait to sit with your boyfriend?" sneered Yuko, bumping past her as the rest of the squad headed to the bus.

"No, Tsukino, it can't wait," said Coach. She stepped toward Serena, propping her clipboard against her hip. "You know, I'm beginning to have doubts about your dedication to this squad. If you're only here to be close to your boyfriend, you're here for the wrong reason."

Serena's cheeks burned. "That is not the reason I'm on this team," she said stiltedly. "Please tell me what you were going to tell me before, Coach."

Coach narrowed her eyes. "I _was_ going to say good job."

Serena felt a surge of guilt. Then Coach continued, "Watch your form. A careless fall like the last one that benched you could seriously screw up our chance at district competition."

The guilt disappeared. That fall had not been her fault, Serena knew that without doubt. Kim had been too busy talking to Rei about her date with her boyfriend to reach up and brace Serena's leg, which was her job in the pyramid formation.

Serena bit her tongue, however, and followed Coach to the bus.

Where Seiko sat, beside Tanaka, holding out his arms to her and lifting his brows suggestively.

Serena stopped stock-still on the bus steps. Her fingers clenched around the hand rail. Distantly she heard the bus doors hiss closed behind her.

"What's the problem, Tsukino?" demanded Coach from her seat behind the driver. "You're holding us up."

Serena licked her lips and looked at the empty spot next to Coach in her seat, where only her purse sat. "Coach, could you please move your purse?"

"Excuse me?" Coach lifted her brows above her sunglasses. "We have rules, Tsukino. I get a seat to myself. Go sit with Seiko like always."

"I won't sit in his lap!" burst from Serena's lips angrily. Flushing, she added, "Or anyone else's!"

But such a furor had spread through the bus that no one heard her second sentence.

The cheerleaders gasped and shrieked and giggled and whispered. The football players chuckled and rumbled.

Serena did not look at Seiko. She looked at Coach, despite all the heat that she felt burning beneath her cheeks.

Coach picked up her purse. "Sit down," she said in a voice so low that only Serena heard it.

Serena sat.

"Drive," said Coach tersely to the driver.

The ride to Minato seemed even worse to Serena than both of her sojourns alone into Roppongi put together. Behind her, she heard all the angry buzzing and the voices calling her "bitch" clearly audible, but she had to pretend that she didn't hear them.

She sat with her back ramrod straight and her face directly ahead as though she didn't care, not even looking at Coach.

But slowly, like liquid from an IV, her confidence dripped from her. Should she really have acted so openly? She should have sat in Seiko's lap this once and then told him later, when there was a chance to do it without half the school around…

But she _had_! She had tried to do that! He had been too wrapped up in his music and talking to Tanaka!

Serena's mind worried at the thoughts, plucking at them like her hands plucked at her pom-pom streamers. Should she have done this? Should she have not? Should she try to fix what she'd done?

L

As events played out, the decision was made for her.

"Good job, Tsukino!"

"Yeah, thanks a lot!"

"Bitch!"

A gush of air rushed from Serena's lungs as yet another of her classmates shoved past her on her return to the bus. It seemed like the whole stadium, both their school's and the opponent school's spectators, knew how she had "rejected" Seiko on the bus.

"Gee, Tsukino, thanks for losing us the championship! Seiko played like crap because of you!"

'_For anyone else, making three field goals in a game wouldn't have been crap_,' said her brain angrily.

But the team had lost to Minato, and everyone was blaming their loss on the slightly-less-than-par performance by their quarterback due to his desolation at being dumped by Serena right before the game.

'_Never mind that you weren't actually dating_,' grumbled Serena's brain.

Buffeted like a fishing lure in stormy water among the crowd, Serena made it to the safety of the bus at last.

"Safety" may have been an inaccurate term, however, considering the iciness of the glares that she felt boring into her back.

She huddled into the front seat and pressed her cell phone to her ear.

"Hi, Dad," she whispered quietly in reply to his greeting. "No, we lost…"

"Oh! MAN!" She heard the sound of her dad snapping his fingers. "Dang it! Well, there's still the bonfire?"

"Yes, sir." Serena's heartbeat sped up in spite herself. Despite all this drama, Darien and Lita would be there…

'_What happened to not getting too attached?_' demanded her brain.

"…okay. Bye, Dad." Serena placed her phone back in its holder.

"Convenient how you forgot to tell him it was YOUR fault we lost." Kim draped herself over the seat two rows behind Serena, glaring.

Serena met her eyes only for a second, then turned to face forward. She stared resolutely at the WEAR YOUR SEATBELTS! poster at the front of the bus while the rest of the team trickled in.

The ride home was even longer than the one to the game, but Serena was the first one off the bus. She stepped off as slowly and nonchalantly as she could, but once she was out of reach of the streetlights, she began to run. The others would be riding together in everyone's cars to the park, and they would beat her there no matter how fast she ran, but she needed to run.

The bonfire at the park was already in full swing by the time she reached the park, panting and sweaty. She realized her disheveled, less-than-fragrant state only then and felt the panicked urge just to run home. Letting Darien see her in THIS state… but then she remembered that he had seen her looking mussed, sweaty, _and _soaked with beer, and still put his arms around her, so she calmed down and cheered up.

Of course, her brain had to put in its two cents' worth. '_Granted, that was to protect you from Creepy Mohawk Guy._'

But by then, Serena had entered the milling crowd, and it was too late to turn back. And, mostly, the memory of his arms and his laughter had made her eager to try for them again.

She found Lita almost immediately; she was the only shadowy form at tall as a boy that had a ponytail. When she saw her, Serena felt something release inside her, like a breath finally exhaled.

"Lita!" she said, throwing her arms around her. "You came!"

Serena was rather ashamed to hear her voice coming out sounding more like a sob than a jubilant greeting.

Apparently Lita noticed this resemblance as well, for she turned in Serena's arms and held her by the arms, then leaned down to peer at her.

"Are you okay?" she asked suspiciously, sniffing. "You don't smell like alcohol."

Serena grinned, genuinely. "No, I smell sweaty and gross!"

Lita shrugged, letting her go. "Can't argue with that."

Nervousness gripped Serena all over again. And again, apparently, Lita noticed, for she said, "I mean, you smell like a fresh summer rain."

Serena knew she was lying, but it made her feel better anyway.

And she felt even better when Lita said, "Anyway, you can't smell any worse than Darien. He's lurking somewhere around the fire in that leather jacket of his, he's got to be sweating buckets."

Serena found herself thinking that probably even Darien's sweat smelled good before her brain stopped her. '_For God's sake,_' it said in disgust.

"Oh my gosh!" exclaimed Serena, suddenly realizing something. "Lita, my brain sounds just like you!"

Lita looked down at her. Then she sighed, shaking her head, and patted Serena's head between her buns. "You really are one weird little chick, Sere-girl."

Serena grinned happily.

Just then, a group of girls walked past her. The one on the edge slammed into her hard with her shoulder and muttered, "Slut!" They laughed raucously.

"What the hell?" Lita made a move forward.

"No, Lita-san!" Serena jumped between her and the retreating backs of the girls. "It's nothing!" She hoped that Lita hadn't heard – and if she had, that she wouldn't believe the girls – and everyone else – about her. Although it would fulfill her depressing prophecy about all her friends becoming not-friends…

"Skanks," said Lita. "That one's skirt is riding up in her thong anyway – what, she didn't think it was short enough already?"

Serena muffled laughter with her fist in her mouth. "I love you, Lita," popped out of her mouth when she could speak without giggling.

Lita's brows lifted, but she grinned in reply.

They found a half-empty picnic table, which quickly emptied the rest of the way when they sat down, and talked for a while.

When they reached a lull in the conversation, Serena craned her head and looked around.

"Where's Darien-san?" she wondered.

"Oh, him." Lita wrinkled her nose. "Probably around talking somewhere. He's good at fitting in with these preps – "

She cut off, glancing at Serena.

"No offense taken," Serena assured her, though she did feel a twinge. She was a prep, after all. Her clothes were the height of preppiness; her mother had made sure of that. What place did she have in Darien and Lita's world?

And yet – he got along with these preppy people, the ones among whom Serena had never been able to find her place? They were doubly incompatible, then…

"It's just because he used to BE one of them," continued Lita. "Before his parents died and he had to take care of himself and Buji on his own."

She had a strange tone as she said this and a measuring look in her eyes as she watched Serena.

"Oh," said Serena. He hadn't told her any of that. She'd never thought that in just a slightly different version of their lives, he could be an upperclassman at her school or even on the football team – although he seemed more like a soccer type to her.

There was a lot that she didn't know about him and Lita, she realized. Did she have the right to force her friendship into their world when she knew nothing about them?

"And you, Lita," she said suddenly. "What was your life like before you lived in Roppongi?"

Surprise chased the watchful expression from Lita's face. She stared at Serena for a moment before finally saying, "I've always lived in Roppongi. My dad was a druggie, and when he ran out of cash to buy crack, he wanted me to do shit I didn't wanna do. So he kicked me out. Then Dare saw me punching some guy's guts out on the streets and offered me a place with – "

She stopped, glancing at Serena with eyes slightly wider than usual, as though surprised by what she herself had said.

"The Wolves," finished Serena for her, earning an even wider stare. She shook her head in wonder. "You're even stronger than you look, Lita."

Lita stared at her some more. Then a corner of her lips quirked up. "Hey, is that a jab at my femininity?"

Serena grinned. "Lita, compare your chest size to mine," she said, pointing at her own woefully flat bust. "It would be hard for even Asanuma to doubt your feminity."

She stopped abruptly and clapped her hands. She had just remembered something. "Lita, do you have a boyfriend?"

"Serena, Darien is going to be disappointed if he realizes it was me you were interested in all this time – "

Serena blushed fiercely. "Lita! I just meant – that guy who came in last time, with the freckles! Is he your boyfriend?"

Now Lita was flushing in the dim light.

"Dammit, Serena, I haven't blushed in years." She dug a hand into her hair. "You've infected me with girl germs or something."

"About time someone did," said a voice from beside Serena.

She turned to see Darien sliding onto the bench next to her. In the meager orange wash of light from the bonfire, the scabbing cut from his eyebrow to his chin looked worse than it had the last time she saw it, enlarged by its own shadow.

But he was grinning at her, the gold flecks in his eyes also magnified by the firelight. "Good job, Serena, I've been trying to find out the truth about her and Motoki for weeks."

"Shields, I'm gonna kick your ass," Lita threatened.

Darien said nothing, just gave her a look from beneath his killer eyelashes.

"Urgh," said Lita, standing up. "Fine. But I'll be back."

She walked off, toward the other side of the fire.

"Why's she leaving?" asked Serena, confused. The only other things to do at the bonfire than talk were dance and drink. Lita had stated that she hated alcohol, and Serena couldn't imagine her dancing with any of her classmates here.

"It's something we arranged beforehand," said Darien, hooking his grin at her. "She got to have some time with you. Now it's my turn."

"Well…um…we could have had time together with all of us…?" said Serena carefully, not sure if she was being stupid. Had she missed something?

Darien just lifted his eyebrows at her, smiling.

Quickly she changed the subject.

"What's this?" she said, touching the silver chain at his neck and the circular pendant that hung from it.

He lifted it from her fingers, sending warmth up her at the contact. "It's a locket, see."

Serena flinched. When her parents found out that the locket that they had bought her was a fake…

Darien appeared not to notice. He popped open his locket with his fingernail, looking suddenly rather grim. Only one side of the locket held a picture, that of an apple-cheeked, dark-haired infant.

"That's Buji. My parents gave it to me when he was born. So that I would remember it was my job to protect him."

"Oh," said Serena softly. Again she was overwhelmed by that yearning to have her own younger sibling.

"And this," said Darien. His grim expression had become something softer, a small smile.

He was touching her collarbone; her breath caught – oh, no he wasn't, he was lifting her own necklace to look at it. "What's the story behind yours?"

Serena arched her neck so that she could look down at the locket on her neck without her chin touching his hand. Such physical contact would be much too presumptuous…and make her blush in a very embarrassing way.

"My parents gave it to me, too," she said quietly. "Not for any reason, though. Just because…"

_Because they wanted to show off how expensive a gift they could afford to buy for me, _she realized as she remembered the first thing they had said when they had given it to her. 'Don't lose it. It was very expensive. If you damage it we'll be very disappointed.'

And she spotted, as a finger of firelight reached out to touch her locket in Darien's fingers, that the nail polish had worn away on the bottom to reveal gray again.

"You okay?" Darien put down the locket. "You look like you've just had an epiphany." He eyed her some more. "An unpleasant one."

Serena shook her head, then admitted, "Just a bit. But what's the point in spoiling the one night in a week I get to talk to you? Tell me about Buji – "

"The point is making you feel better," Darien interrupted. "You were the one so adamant on becoming friends. One of the responsibilities of a friend is that they help you feel better."

Serena shook her head violently. "I didn't want to become friends with you just so I could dump my problems on you," she said stubbornly. "Please just talk to me. Tell me about your life. Like…"

She reached up tentatively and ran her finger lightly down the scar shadowing his face. "…has there been any more trouble with the Black Moon?"

Somehow they had gotten so close to each other that Serena felt his heart skip a beat.

Slowly, his eyes closed.

"You know about that?" His murmur was just loud enough for her to hear.

Serena bit her lip. She lowered her hand to her side. "Yes. I looked you up. I'm sorry – "

"Then why are you still here?" His eyelids flew open, his gaze shooting out at her like blue bullets. "It's one thing to waltz into Roppongi alone and quite another to play friends with someone you know belongs to a gang!"

"And it's one thing to run around terrorizing innocent people and quite another to protect your family!" retorted Serena.

She was suddenly breathing very fast; she found herself glaring at him rather than flinching away from his obvious anger. "That's hardly even gang activity! And if it was, what difference would it make? Does your gang have RULES against becoming FRIENDS?"

"No!" Darien's fist slammed into the picnic table. "But your people do!"

"My people?" Serena repeated in confusion, her blonde brows knitting.

"What kind of car does your dad drive, Serena? How many bedrooms are in your house? How many of those pieces of gold jewelry do you have?"

He shot the spate of questions at her too fast to possibly expect her to answer. But he glared into her eyes the entire time, as though demanding _something_ from her. "Our levels are so far apart we're practically not on the same planet!"

And there it was again.

Rejection.

She didn't belong in his world. She had known it all along, why had she deluded herself…

Her brain moved her legs without her awareness; the next thing she knew she was scrambling from the bench and walking away as quickly as her legs could take her. She heard some noise behind her, maybe someone calling her name, but she kept going, burrowing through the crowds of drinking dancing teenagers, and it was a gut-wringing rerun of last Friday night. She was running. Again.

As she made her hurried beeline toward the park's exit, little did she know that someone else was making a beeline for her.

"Check it out, he's sloshed!"

"Bet you ten bucks he hurls in the next five minutes!"

"Dude, Seiko, are you even conscious?"

"RRRARGH!"

With a slurred roar, Seiko threw his solid body into Serena's path. His collision with her sent them both to the ground.

Serena scrambled hastily back to her feet, untangling her limbs from Seiko's, blinking back the hot water in her eyes to hide them from the audience that was congealing around them like blood around a wound.

Seiko, on his butt in the grass, twisted around, planting his hands in the grass, and retched.

And retched and retched and retched.

Serena watched with a disbelieving horror. Guilt nailed her feet into place as the chunky splashes filled the spectators' rapt silence.

Seiko had gotten this drunk because of what she had done to him.

"He's still going!" went the half impressed, half disgusted commentary through the crowd. The crush of classmates around them thinned slightly as people lost interest.

At last Seiko's heaving stopped. He turned back around, swiping a sleeve across his mouth. Even in the dim light from the bonfire, his eyes were visibly bloodshot as he stared at Serena.

"What the hell, 'Rena?" he groaned, still slurring. "You effed everything up."

A ripple of agreement travelled through the spectators.

Serena stared wide-eyed at him and felt her tongue trying to burrow down her throat to hide. She heard herself gag.

"I'm…willing…to give you…another chance," hiccoughed Seiko, swaying to his feet in several broken movements. He lurched forward. "I'll even…let that bastard…you were talking to…leave…without…kicking his ass."

Terror filled Serena. Like steam in a pressure cooker, more, more, more, more – until there was no more room in her for it. It had to go somewhere else. Become something else.

And at Seiko's threat, she reached her bursting point. The terror hissed into fury.

"As if you could!" she spat.

Around them, the whispers became a jeering, "Ooooh!"

Seiko's face twisted.

Stars exploded on the right side of her face. Then pain.

Dazedly, Serena realized that Seiko had just hit her.

"Listen, you whore," he panted. His hands gripped her by her hair, her toes brushing the ground, her face close to his, so close that she was choking on his vomity breath. "You're MY girlfriend."

Tears were springing to her eyes at the pain of her hair slowly tearing from her scalp. She gasped in harsh, short breaths like sobs. In the background, she heard dimly a voice that sounded like Rei's screaming, "Stop! Put her down!"

Seiko yanked her higher. Her back arched in pain as the agony from her scalp lanced down her spine.

When Seiko was suddenly still she didn't notice it. She felt only the ripping pain. Water was smearing her vision and his grip squeezed her eyelids half-shut. She could only see the underside of Seiko's chin and part of his neck.

But that was where the silver knife blade appeared.

It glinted at her through the blear of tears as though winking in reassurance.

"You're going to put her down. Slowly." A bright red line seeped out on Seiko's neck just above the glinting blade.

Then the line disappeared as Seiko's fingers uncurled from her hair and she dropped bonelessly to the ground.

A pair of hands caught her under the arms before her kneecaps could crunch into the dirt.

"I said _slowly_!" snarled Darien's voice above and in front of her.

She heard the slap-thunk sound of fist meeting flesh, then a whole succession of them, quickly drowned out by sudden hoots and shouts from the crowd.

"Up we go," grunted Lita's voice in her ear, shaking almost as much as Serena was. She felt herself being lifted. "Mother-effing bastard – "

Awareness returned to Serena in slow patches, like vision returning after the momentary blindness caused by a bright light.

"Lita," she managed, "Lita, you've gotta stop them."

"Stop Dare from whipping that bastard's fucking ass? No goddamn way."

Just then, the wail of sirens pierced the sounds of jeering and fighting. The cheering shattered like glass into shrieks and cussing voices as the crowd of teens scattered.

Within a minute, only Serena and Lita, Darien and Seiko, were left. Seiko was on the ground on his side, blood gushing from his nose and his eyes half-shut.

Rei, Serena realized, was also still there, sitting on a picnic table bench with her cast-encased leg stretched out in front of her and her crutch propped beside her.

"Leave him," she said as Serena's eyes landed on her. Her voice was pure acid. "If he tries to tell them who messed up his face, I'll tell my dad what he did to you. He won't say anything." She shoved the bottom of her crutch into his ribs. "Will you, vomit-face?"

He moaned.

"Shut up," snapped Rei. "He gave you a punch in the face. You want me to give you more?"

"Rei-chan," said Serena uncertainly.

"Get out of here," said Rei sharply. "You wanna get caught?"

"But – "

"I won't kill him, don't worry."

"That's not what – "

"I'll be fine. I won't get charged with anything. My breath's clean, I'm handicapped, and my dad's a sergeant. Can you say the same?"

"C'mon!" Before Serena knew it, Lita had her slung over her shoulder, like a baby being burped, and they were crashing away through the dark trees.

After only a few dozen meters they reached a shadowed corner of parking lot where the two motorcycles that Serena had seen before were parked.

Lita threw Serena onto one and climbed on in front of her. A helmet was shoved into Serena's lap from the side; she looked up to see Darien mounting the other motorcycle and revving it. Serena hastily jammed on the helmet and grabbed Lita's waist.

As soon as her fingers locked together, the motorcycle roared beneath them. The front wheel took to the air for a moment before slamming back onto the asphalt and tearing into the street.

Serena floated in and out of awareness, her helmeted head against Lita's trembling back and fatigue washing in and out over her like a tide, but she was pretty sure that they stopped too early to have reached Roppongi. She lifted her head and saw that Darien had pulled over in front of the deserted, tree-filled grounds of a shrine, and Lita was pulling in after him.

"Shit!" Lita tore off her helmet. "Effing _bastards_! The FUCK you didn't bash him up for – "

"Lita!" Darien's voice was sharp. "Walk it off."

Still snarling a blistering string of sewage, Lita yanked her leg from over the bike. She stalked into the trees, her fists clenching and unclenching viciously.

"She's fine," said Darien tightly at the expression on Serena's face.

He didn't seem so fine himself. But that could have had something to do with the huge gush of blood coursing down his forehead from over one eye, which he had squeezed shut.

"She just has some anger management issues." He glanced in the direction Lita had gone before returning his gaze to her.

"Okay." Serena's voice was barely an exhalation. She couldn't tear her eyes from his face. One side was bisected by a massive scar, the other masked in blood.

"You alright?" he asked, looking at her through his one open eye. He turned his face to the side, away from her, and it was obvious even to her that he had done it to save her from having to look at its gory condition.

Guilt filled her.

"I am, but you're not." She reached deliberately out to touch the cut above his eye.

He pulled away from her.

"It's fine," he said. "Don't touch it. You'll get blood on your hands."

Serena's lip trembled. She look down at the motorcycle handlebars, then remembered her backpack. She swung it around into her lap. From the back compartment, she pulled out a package of antibacterial wipes and the second-largest bandage from her bandage selection, a square slightly smaller than her palm.

"What are you?" said Darien's voice. "Nurse Joy?"

She looked up to see him leaning toward her on his bike, his open eye wide as it took in the assortment of first-aid supplies in her bag.

"You're not the only one who gets into fights," said Serena, managing to keep her voice steady and casual. As though he hadn't just gotten beaten up for her at a party to which she had invited him.

While he was distracted by her bag, she snatched the opportunity to dart her hand up and swipe the source of blood above his eye. There was an imprint of letters on the skin there; Seiko must have punched Darien with his left hand, splitting the skin with his ornate MVP ring.

"I just fight against sidewalks and gravity instead of people," she concluded.

Darien smiled unenthusiastically at her. Then he caught the wrist of her hand that was wiping his forehead.

"I can do this," he said, motioning at his bloodied face with his free hand.

Serena's stomach quivered like jelly at the physical contact. Involuntarily her eyes flicked up to his fingers around her wrist.

His eyes followed hers; he quickly unlocked his fingers, dropping his hand. Serena's shoulders slumped the tiniest bit.

She dropped her eyes to her lap but did not lower her hand from his forehead.

"You've saved my life twice." Her voice nearly cracked on the last word.

"Let me do something – " Her voice did crack this time. " – let me feel like there's _something_ I can actually do! God!"

Her last word was an angry cry, and she scrubbed the humiliating tears from her face, furious with herself. She knew that she would never be tough enough, never capable enough, to belong in his world! But could she at least not show him how utterly pathetic she was?

At least he released her hand. She wiped at the rest of his face without looking at him, until he was blood-free. The night air was very cold against the wet trails on her cheeks. He was very quiet and very still, as though she was treating a statue.

With one hand holding his bangs away from the cut made by Seiko's ring and holding the bandage in the other hand, she tore away the bandage's packaging with her teeth. She placed the bandage meticulously over the cut, smoothing it against the inflamed skin.

"There," she said. Unwilling, but feeling obligated by courtesy, she glanced down to meet his eyes.

But his eyes were down; he was staring at his hands in his lap.

"I hate," he said, his voice slow and deliberate, "that people have the power to make another person feel like they're not a human being."

Serena stared at him. She was frozen, pinned in place as effectively as if he had taken a nail and hammered it through her heart. She might have made a noise of pain, of disbelief, of agreement, she didn't know.

"You…" His voice was quiet, then abruptly gained volume. "You weren't even fighting back!"

His head flew up, and he glared at her, the golden flecks in his eyes flaring like sparks.

"Did you think you DESERVED that?" he nearly shouted. "Why the hell didn't you fight back?"

She didn't answer – couldn't.

He stared at her, breathing hard.

"I don't understand you," he said at last. His voice was low, harsh. "You wander around Roppongi alone, you befriend a gang member, you – you _flirt_ with a gang LEADER! But you don't stand up to a puffed-up daddy's boy who was so drunk he couldn't even stand up straight!"

_Flirt_.

She stared at him, her face bleaching of color.

"You _knew_?" she heard herself whisper. He had noticed, then, her pathetic fixation in him, her idiotic near-obsession –

"Oh, NOW you're scared?" He laughed.

The sound rang like metal. It held no amusement, instead an almost violent irritation. It stabbed confusion even further into her, shame infecting the wound.

Her voice was as quiet as the rustle of bed sheets. "Then why did you bother fighting him?"

"Why?" He laughed metallically again. This time she got the impression that he was laughing not at her but at himself. "Because I wanted you to be _my _girlfriend."

. ..

…

…

_'Oh. My. God.'_

Serena was inclined to agree with her brain.

In an ideal world, Darien would have waited for her response. This would have given her the time to gape at him and replay in her head fifty times what he had just said in order to confirm that yes, that WAS what he had just said.

But he tore his eyes away from her quickly and shoved his helmet back onto his head.

"Get on." He shifted on his motorcycle, freeing a space for her to sit behind him. "Lita's gonna be awhile. I'll take you home."

When a minute passed without her moving, his shoulders hunched more tensely beneath his leather jacket.

"Look." He spoke without turning around. "I'm not gonna try anything, okay?"

At last Serena regained enough control over her body to lick her bone-dry lips. It was mortifyingly obvious from the stretched sound of her voice that her throat was as tight as if she was going into anaphylactic shock.

"C-c-can you s-say that a-ag-gain?"

His knuckles tightened to white knobs around the handlebars. "I said, I'm not going to do anything to you."

"No – " She shook her head violently, making the helmet shake around her ears. "Before that."

Darien's back went even stiffer. She saw the outline of his spine straining against the heavy leather of his jacket.

"Come on," he said; his voice was stretched as hers; it cracked. "You're not gonna make me say that cheesy line?"

Now it was Serena's turn for her voice to crack. "Please."

He turned around. Slowly he pulled up the visor of his helmet. The golden flecks in his midnight eyes burned out at her.

"Be my girlfriend."

There was a black hole in Serena's stomach. It sucked all the air from her lungs; she felt as though her chest was about to cave in. She sucked in a long, trembling breath, staring up at him.

Then she nodded. Once, twice, in jerky movements. It was the least romantic motion that could possibly have existed.

But his response wasn't extremely romantic either. He yanked off his helmet and stared at her, his hair sticking up.

Disbelief stained his voice. "Yes?"

She felt like the little mermaid who had lost her voice. She forced herself to find it and managed to croak, "Y-yes! I mean – if you – if you want me to – "

"Yes, I want you to!"

He was climbing off his bike and laughing. This time it was a real laugh. His arms came around her hard. Not hard enough to hurt her but hard enough to assure her of his sincerity.

"God, Serena, I've said it twice, how many more times do I have to say it to get it through your dumpling head?"

"Again," said Serena stubbornly through the helmet, feeling like a child demanding more and enjoying the feeling. She put her head, helmet and all, tentatively against his chest.

In that position she felt his laughter before she heard it. "_Yes_, I want you to," he said. "I want you."

Her insides positively puckered. Her fingers curled in his jacket. Only the wave of night air rushing in to pat her face with cold fingers when he pulled the helmet from her head returned her to awareness.

"Why?" she asked against his jacket. Her nose was a centimeter from the bump made by the silver locket below his thin white shirt.

"You're asking me?" The lightest tint of bitterness colored his voice, his fingers combing through her hair did not retreat. "I think the real question is why _me_."

"Oh, if you want to know that we'll be here all night," said Serena happily, playing with his locket. Then she realized what she had said and squeaked, turning her face into his jacket to hide the radioactive flush that suffused her cheeks.

"What – ah." He pulled away for just a second, then pulled her close to him again. This time she heard his chuckle in his chest and his grin against her hair.

_'He felt us blushing,'_ explained her brain, doing a tomato impression of its own.

"I don't understand you," Darien informed the top of her head. But he lowered his head further to nuzzle her hair.

Serena's eyes flew wide, a shiver racing down her body. When it faded, she tilted her head back to look up at him. A wide and silly but irrepressible grin was covering her face. And he…

_'He's leaning – he's leaning!'_ shrieked her brain.

His eyelashes brushed hers; hers eyelids shuddered shut –

"I should take you home," he breathed into her ear.

Serena slumped despite the exquisite sensation sparkling from her ear to her core. She had been so sure that he was going to –

"This is your chance to argue."

Serena looked up at him in hope – then looked away. Her parents would definitely be expecting her. Especially if they somehow heard that the bonfire party had been broken up by police…

"I should go." She looked up at him, trying to make sure with her expression and her eyes that he understood it was not because she wanted to leave. "My parents will worry."

He shook his head, spikes of hair flopping over to the other side of his face. "Of course."

There was a sudden tightness in his expression that had not been there before. She wanted to make it go away.

"I don't want to go," she offered.

He refocused his eyes on her and smiled. But the expression was less like the sun emerging from behind the clouds and more like dirt being swept beneath the rug.

"Of course you don't," he said, still smiling. "Who would want to leave my intoxicating presence?"

"I don't drink," Serena informed him as a retort.

Darien snickered suddenly. "That's a good thing, considering how hard it is for you to walk when you're sober."

Serena crossed her arms and sniffed. "You know, if you're going to be that way, I can take back what I said."

Darien's grin widened. Then it vanished suddenly, morphing into apprehension, a strange expression on his scarred face. "Does it bother you?"

Automatically Serena's hand was lifting to rest against his jaw.

"No," she said in surprise, and then, a little scandalized by her own boldness, she pulled her hand back.

He caught it, staring into her with his night-sky eyes again. "You were teasing."

"Ye-es," Serena said with a little hesitation. "Is that okay?"

"Yes," he said. "But only if I can do it to you."

"Okay."

"Okay."

He was still holding her hand. She was still looking at him.

Then her cell phone buzzed at her waist.

She flinched, yanking automatically away from Darien. Acutely aware of his watching eyes, she fumbled the phone from its holders and opened it. "Yes, Daddy?"

"Are you alright? Where are you?"

Serena winced. She had totally forgotten the time; of course her parents would have been expecting a call.

"I'm fine. A friend's bringing me home." She winced again as she said '_friend_,' studiously looking at the pleat of her skirt instead of Darien.

"Who? How far away are you? I'll come get you."

"No, we're almost home! We just stopped for – for milk!"

"We who?"

Serena bit her lip. She had tried so hard to avoid the question. "Darien. He's in a grade above me. He's um – " She winced again. " – a friend of Seiko's."

"Where is Seiko? Why isn't he bringing you home?"

"Um, Dad, I can't hear you! The reception's really bad! I'll be home in a few minutes, okay? Bye!"

She snapped the phone shut and fidgeted, sneaking a peek up at Darien.

He swung his leg over the motorcycle and motioned her on behind him.

His voice was neutral as he handed her the helmet. "Friend of Seiko's, huh? This Seiko wouldn't happen to be the one whose nose I broke, by any chance?"

"I'm sorry!" Serena burst out. "It's just, my parents, they're really – well, they love Seiko, and they're really protective – "

"I'm not criticizing them," he said quickly.

Serena subsided, untensing slightly against his back as the motorcycle pulled out into the street. "I know. It's just – I don't want you to think – I mean, they might not – um – "

"Approve of me?" She felt his voice from where the side of her face was against his back rather than heard it over the rush of the wind.

She pressed her face closer against the warm leather, closing her eyes. "Yes."

"I figured they wouldn't."

They were pulling into her neighborhood, and his voice was odd again, stretched by a tension underneath.

"Are you sure this is what you want?"

Her arms tightened around his waist, as though he would disappear, the way Mina had. "Yes!" Why would he ask? "Don't…don't you?"

"Yes!" The exclamation point at the end of his response echoed hers. She smiled happily, pushing her forehead into the spot between his shoulder blades. A laugh escaped him, and she felt that, too.

She told him so. "I can feel you laughing."

He laughed again, and then they were coasting to a stop in front of her house. The lights were all on, and when she looked up from his beautiful black hair she saw a silhouette passing in front of one of the first floor windows. Apprehension chased the delirium from her veins.

Hastily she climbed off the motorcycle, straightening her clothes and then her helmet, although her hands encountered the helmet instead. Darien laughed quietly again as he took it off for her. She dared not grab his hand lest her parents see, but she grabbed his eyes with her own.

"I shouldn't stay," he said, reading her gaze.

Serena bit down on her lip. "When will I see you again?"

He looked at her, then flicked a glance over her shoulder. Quickly but with no seeming sense of haste he put the helmet over his own head, casually concealing his face behind the black visor.

"Do you trust me?"

She stared at him.

_'Did he really just say that?'_ demanded her brain.

Serena frowned, continuing to stare at him as she reached down to pinch her arm.

Darien laughed again as she yelped.

"Are you real?" she demanded of him.

Distractedly she realized that this was the same question that he had asked of her a week ago. The realization made her warm inside, and she clasped her hands together behind her back. Then she answered his question without waiting for an answer to hers: "Yes."

"Good," he said. The sudden roughness of his voice made her think that he too had felt the déjà vu from the question that she had asked him. "Then I'll find you."

"Serena?"

Serena spun. Behind her, she heard the motorcycle rev and zoom off down the street. "Daddy!"

"Who was that?"

"I told you. Darien." Serena winced internally. "He's a little older than us, but I know him, and he offered to bring me home."

Her father frowned at her. "You know how I feel about motorcycles, Serena. You should have called me."

_'And risked Seiko seeing you and telling you about Darien?_' said her brain. _'I don't think so.'_

"Yes, Daddy," she said.

His frown lessened somewhat, and he stepped closer to her, wrapping an arm around her shoulders that was somehow just as heavy as Seiko's. "You look tired. It must have been rough, having to act happy with everyone after the team lost so badly."

Serena had to bite down hard on her cheek from breaking into a huge smile; she could still see Darien staring at her – _'Do you trust me?'_ She shivered.

"Uh-oh. I hope you're not getting a cold, young lady!" Her father released her and pushed her toward the stairs. "Off to bed with you! Next weekend is another game!"

Serena was only too pleased to obey; she ran up the stairs and into her room, racing into her pajamas. And once she was done, she half-dove under her covers, huddling there in a trembling ball and hugging her pillow close to her as she buried her face in it.

She was Darien's _girlfriend_. Darien _liked_ her. Maybe even _loved _her! She muffled a squeak of rapture into her pillow. He liked her he liked her he liked her – she remembered the feel of his breath in her ear and broke out in goosebumps all over again, hugging the pillow tighter. And the way his voice had sounded after she asked him if he was real…

Serena shivered some more.

L

A/N: Like before, PLEASE review. Too melodramatic? Does the relationship seem realistic? This is a more physical romance than any I've really written before. I don't want it to seem totally appearance-based and shallow…?


	3. Chapter 3

A/N: Heheheh. Now I have proof for all the people that I take too long to get Serena and Darien together in STC. I just have to show them all the reviews for this story! Thank you to everyone for reading this ridiculous story that has grown more and more inconvenient with each paragraph. It's very different from anything I've written before. Also – in case anyone hasn't noticed by now – please note that this is the most unrealistic story I've ever written (STC's superpowers notwithstanding). Please suspend your skepticism and pretend that parts of Tokyo could be so Gotham-like.

Also, my sincerest apologies, but because of a monstrous assignment (well, several), STC will not be out for at least another month. That's why I decided to hurriedly finish this story and give it to you guys, as an apology. Sorry!

Jade-eye, I would like to deplore the horrible influence you have had on me. A non-homicidal Rei and a yakuza Darien? This story's definitely thanks to you!

Last, BIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIG language warning.

Disclaimer: I don't own Sailor Moon or Darien's green jacket. I do own his leather jacket, which is much more attractive, if I do say so myself.

L

Leather and Lockets

Three

L

Seiko was absent from school Monday. Rumors abounded that he was getting facial surgery to repair the damage done to his face by the fight on Friday night. Serena knew that it wasn't possible that he had any more than a broken and possibly very swollen purple nose, but no one asked her. Everyone avoided her. This was not such a large change to her; she figured that this time her exclusion was because the other kids blamed her for Seiko's failure to win the football game on Friday night.

She discovered differently, however, when Rei spoke to her at practice that afternoon.

"So," she said as Serena applied a hasty coat of nail polish to her locket. The exposed gray metal had begun to leave a green spot on her collarbone. "You're dating that gang guy?"

Serena started, nearly dropping the nail polish. "Um! What? Where did you hear that?"

Rei rolled her eyes. "Only from everyone in a fifty mile radius."

Serena said nothing, trying to make sure she could actually speak without squeaking before she attempted.

"Not that it matters to me," Rei said. "But if you weren't dating him, you would probably want to say you aren't so the rumors die down at least a little. Because it's ruining your reputation." She made a face. "What little you had, I guess, no offense."

Serena's face was pretty pink by now. She could guess what kind of insinuations to which Rei was referring. Suddenly the leers from some of the boys in her PE class that morning made sense.

"You are, aren't you?"

Serena looked up at Rei, biting her lip. Then she shook her head at herself, angrily. Dating Darien was nothing to be ashamed of! Any girl with an IQ higher than 2 should realize how amazing he was!

"Yes," she said defiantly. "I am."

Gasps erupted from the changing stalls behind them.

Serena and Rei spun to see Kim opening one of the stall doors. She leaned against the wall, crossing her arms over her uniform.

"So you _are_ dating that yakuza." Kim narrowed her mascared eyes. "Your standards are even lower than any of us thought. Where does he take you for dates, the Makaiju Club?"

Serena's lips pressed together. She stared at Kim.

Kim went on. "And as usual, you're not thinking about the team. What about our reputation? One of our members, dating a gang member? Do you know what people are going to think of us? And who knows what sort of _disease_ we could get from you – "

"Stop it." Serena stood up abruptly. "You don't even know him."

Kim snorted. "Like you do either. What would a guy like that want from you, Serena, except – "

"_Stop it_!" Serena shouted, her eyes squeezing shut. She didn't want this, this dirty sludge that Kim was hurling at the beautiful mural she had in her head of her relationship with Darien, making the colors and lines run into something obscene and dirty.

"Oh, would you look at that? The little klutz has grown a backbone. Are you going to have your boyfriend beat me up like he beat up Seiko?"

"Seiko was – !" Serena broke off as she looked at Kim, at her hard, taunting face.

_'Nothing you say will change her mind,'_ her brain said. Kim wouldn't listen to reason, she didn't want to, Serena realized. For whatever reason, Kim was determined to dislike her.

"Fine." Serena turned back to her locker. "Never mind."

"No, no, Serena, why don't you tell us? What were you going to tell us?" Kim jumped over the bench to stand very close to Serena at her locker, leaning over her, getting in her face.

Serena stared determinedly into her locker, studiously ignoring Kim's chest right next to her face.

"Hey. HEY!" Rei's crutch swung out, slapping Kim in the hip. "Back off!"

"Ow! Damn it, Rei!" Kim grabbed her bruised side with a manicured hand and glared. "What the hell's _your_ problem?"

"Leave her alone," said Rei. "None of us stuck our boobs in your face when you dated that pothead a few months ago."

Titters filled the locker room as the girls who had gathered to watch the scene exchanged knowing glances with each other.

"Watch it!" Kim snapped. She glared first at Rei, then Serena, and then the rest of their teammates. "If you think this won't affect the rest of us, then you're idiots! You saw what her _boyfriend_ – " She pointed at Serena and sneered. " – did to Seiko."

Now came gasps, and whispers.

"She's dating THAT psycho?"

"OMG!"

"Is she INSANE?"

Kim threw Serena a smirk. "That's what I thought."

"GIRLS!" Coach suddenly appeared at the locker room door. "Is this practice or a quilting bee? Get yours butts out here! Tsukino, what are you doing, painting your toenails? Get dressed!"

L

Serena slumped out of the locker room after practice. There was no doubt that the girls had been much rougher with her than necessary today – "_accidentally_" slapping her in the face with their pom-poms during routines, tripping her, shaking intentionally when she was climbing to the top of the pyramid.

She'd fallen twice, eliciting frowns from Coach and insistences from the other girls that Serena was heavier than they remembered. She must have gained weight, they said, exchanging meaningful, laughing glances with each other, leading to a whole new round of hissed insinuations.

On top of that, she hadn't seen Darien since Friday.

Maybe she had just imagined that he had wanted her to be his girlfriend. Maybe someone had spiked her drink that night and caused her to hallucinate. And what the point in enduring all this abuse if she'd just dreamed that whole wonderful, impossible conversation with Darien?

Except that she hadn't had anything to drink that night that could have caused her to hallucinate.

She sighed again, rubbing her scalp. Yukino's foot had somehow – '_Somehow!' _spat her brain – ended up on one of her pigtails while Serena was in a split, and when Serena had jumped back up from the split, her hair had nearly been ripped from her scalp. She had taken out both buns just because it hurt so badly, and now her hair was a messy tangle all over. It was still sweaty, too, because she'd fled the locker room without showering lest someone "accidentally" steal her clothes while she was in the stall.

Again she sighed, pushing her bangs out of her eyes, and looked up from her feet to cross the street.

Her heart skipped.

Because Darien was right there – only a few meters away. Leaning against his motorcycle, picking at the threads fraying in the knee of his jeans, he looked deliciously delinquent as he waited just outside the school gate.

Distantly she heard her footsteps speed up, distantly she heard her breathing pick up – then she stood in front of him.

And he was smiling at her. The scabbed knife cut pulled at his lips, hitching one corner of his smile higher than the other.

"Hi," she breathed.

His lips were parted as though to say something, but he silently lifted his hand instead. She felt, as light as a breath, the weight of his hand touching her hair.

She continued to look at him until his eyes fells to hers.

"Quite the hairstyle," he told her.

In any other situation she would have bitten her lip in embarrassment, but it was impossible for her to feel self-conscious about her hair when he had just touched it so gently.

Instead she just smiled happily, leaning against his hand like a kitten begging to be petted.

He noticed.

"You're just like a cat," he said. But there was a pleased note in his voice. "I should stop putting up with Buji begging me for a pet and just bring you home instead."

Serena opened her eyes and grinned up at him. "Okay. But I refuse to eat cat food." She paused, considering. "Except tuna."

"Only tuna," he agreed.

His thumb rubbed ever so gently behind her ear, not quite the same way that one would scratch a cat behind the ears. At least, it didn't inspire _quite_ the same relaxing sensation in Serena. Instead it drew a blush up her neck like rose vines creeping up a trellis.

She continued to gaze at him, aware of the fact that her face was quite evidently pink but not quite connecting that fact to the fact that he was right there watching her blush. Not until he had moved his hand from her hair to touch her hot cheek did she realize this fact, and she blushed even more darkly, jumping.

He laughed softly and pulled his hand away. "Are you free?"

Serena thought of the time, thought of her parents, looked at his face, and thought no more. "Yes."

"Good." He smiled at her, that cut pulling his lips up again. He had such very nice teeth. And voice. And eyes. And everything. "What do you want to do?"

Serena blinked, pulling herself out of her contemplation of Darien's various nice features. She had spent so much time agonizing first over whether he liked her and then _why_ he liked her and then whether she'd just dreamed that he liked her, that she hadn't spared a single thread of thought from the tangle to consider what they would do once they were together.

"Um," she said. It was far too early for dinner and a movie, not to mention that she was far too mussed. And somehow dinner and a movie wasn't the kind of date scenario in which she pictured Darien. "What do YOU want to do?"

"I _want_ to go back in time and have planned this better." Darien pushed a hand through his hair, looking half-sheepish and half-annoyed.

"Plan it?" A little frown wrinkled Serena's forehead. "Spontaneity is more romantic," she decided.

"You say that now," said Darien with a quirk of his lips.

"I want to go see Buji," Serena decided, ignoring him and putting her hands together in front of her.

Darien's brows lifted. "No."

Serena froze in mid-breath, shocked by this unhesitant refusal. "Why not?"

"Aside from the obvious reason that I want you to spend time with me and not my little brother – " He was teasing her in an attempt to distract her, and she knew it, and when he saw that she knew it, he gave up. "I only have about an hour before I need to be somewhere, and I couldn't take you to Roppongi, let you visit Buji, and bring you back in that short a time."

He stopped speaking, steadily meeting the stare that she was giving him. She worried at her lips with her teeth, feeling the urge to break eye contact and look at the ground but also an equally strong reluctance to act with him the same way she acted with her father and, until recently, with Seiko.

"Homework," said Darien suddenly.

Serena blinked. Her attention to the current conflict weakened somewhat as the thought of the red-ink-covered chemistry test that she just received that morning wriggled into her mind. She was closer to failing the class than she had been to Darien when she rode behind him on his motorcycle.

"We could work on your homework," Darien continued, his lips curving into a smile as he watched her. "I could help you."

"You know," said Serena, mentally cringing away from her inner contemplations of horror, "Homework really isn't very romantic."

But he had seen her expression. "Oh no you don't! I know that face from Buji. How far behind are you?"

Serena shot him a pained look. This scenario wasn't romantic at ALL. He was acting more like a mother than a boyfriend.

"That look doesn't work on me," Darien informed her, taking her by the arm and leading her back through the school gate, toward one of the picnic tables placed beneath the oak tree. "Exposure to Buji has made me immune to them."

Serena grumbled unintelligibly. Buji was much cuter than her. If his puppy eyes didn't work on Darien, then hers certainly wouldn't make a dent.

"What subject is it? I'm not much good at literature, but if it's science…" Darien's blue eyes fairly sparkled.

Serena swallowed at the sight. Then she resolutely tore her eyes away, sighing loudly to make sure that he was made aware of her vehement disapproval of the situation.

Although…she did kind of want to see that sparkle in his eyes again.

L

Serena ran through the front door without thinking, still blushing madly and with a huge grin on her face. She wanted nothing more than to go and bury her hot face into her pillow again and just revel in the wonder that was Darien Shields. He had been so encouraging, so funny – "Magnesium and oxygen are like you and me, right? Total opposites. Positive charge and negative charge. But they come together and stick – " And he'd grabbed her hand. " – because they're so different. See?" And he hadn't let go of her hand –

"Serena?"

She started, shooting up straight. Dread saturated her body as she realized that she'd just run with a mad grin on her face into the living room right in front of her parents.

Her father stood from the couch. Above his glasses his forehead was creased into a frown. "Explain yourself, young lady."

Serena swallowed.

_'Stupid, what were you thinking anyway running in without even waiting to check your hair? You didn't even call them!'_ berated her brain.

"Well?"

Serena gulped again, peeking up into her father's eyes. He had his arms crossed – and the sight was suddenly superimposed by her memory of Kim that afternoon, standing with her arms crossed as she dripped false venom about Darien.

She hadn't been ashamed to tell Kim and the rest of the squad that she was dating Darien – and they would definitely spread the news through the whole school. If she wasn't ashamed for all of them to know, then she shouldn't be afraid to tell her parents, either!

Serena squared her shoulder and lifted her chin. "I'm dating Darien."

Silence followed her words. Her father stared at her, and she stared back, biting her lip. She tried to keep her courage from leaking out of her as red began to leak into her father's face.

His lips compressed, his jaw very tight as his eyes bored into her. At long last, he said, "He's a friend of Seiko's."

_'Tell him that you lied about that, this is going to get out of control – '_

"Yes." Serena made one tight nod.

Her father continued to stare at her. It was all that she could do not to squirm.

Finally, he said, "What about Seiko?"

Serena felt the stirrings of anger in her stomach. She hated, she realized, how much her parents idolized Seiko, the pedestal upon which they placed him. He drunk himself senseless, ignored her except when he wanted someone on his arm or his lap, and _hit _her –

_'Don't do it,'_ her brain warned –

"I don't like Seiko," Serena declared firmly. "He's a jerk."

Her father's eyebrows flew up, and her mother made a little noise behind him on the couch.

"But dear – _why_? Seiko's such a nice young man!"

"I'd advise you to rethink your options, Serena." Her father gazed at her, his voice calm. "Seiko's been around for you for a very long time. Don't throw away your relationship with him over a little crush."

Her brain bristled despite itself. _'How patronizing!'_

Serena bristled herself. "It's _not _a little crush."

_'Well, I don't know about _that_,'_ began her brain.

"I like him, and he likes me." Serena's chin jutted out further. "And Seiko will never be a MILLIONTH as good as Darien!"

With that, she spun around and dashed up the stairs, pulsing with the thrill of finally – finally! – speaking her mind to her parents! Why hadn't she started years earlier?

Unheard by Serena, her brain sighed. _'I know why.'_

L

After practice two days later – which she was able to endure only because of the prospect of seeing Darien afterward – Serena showered hastily and hurried out to the school gate. With an abrupt sinking of her insides, she saw there were no motorcycles or leather jackets in sight.

Of course she had known that he might not be able to come today, just as he hadn't been able to come the day before. He had told her so, after all, told her that she shouldn't wait for him if she didn't want to. But as always she'd allowed herself to become too dependent on an uncertain hope.

Still…she glanced back at the clock tower that stretched above the main office building of the school. Her mad dash from the locker room had made her rather early…

She would wait, she decided, for a few more minutes.

She made her way to the picnic table where she had sat with Darien two days earlier and pulled out that day's chemistry homework. She had understood at least three-fourths of that day's ionic and covalent bonding lecture thanks to Darien's brief tutelage. And she had – for the first time in a long time – the feeling that she could actually _do _the homework. Here was fluorine, and Darien had said that she could remember it was the funnest of the elements because it started with an F, so all the other elements wanted to be with it... and here was oxygen…that would go with sulfur…

"BOO!" A pair of hands seized Serena's shoulder.

"EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!"

The scream that tore out of Serena curdled even her own blood. She spun, wrenching away, only to see Darien grinning down at her.

She gaped at him. Her heart felt as though it was a goldfish that had jumped out of its bowl and now lay on the floor twitching.

"Da – ri – en," she wheezed, clutching at the hole where her heart had been before it jumped out of her chest..

"Sorry," he said, the curve of his lips not at all repentant. "I couldn't help it. You were just concentrating so hard."

Serena blushed a little, knowing what a weird face she made when she was concentrating. When she was trying to balance at the top of the pyramid without falling, the other girls always told her to stick her tongue back in her mouth and stop scrunching her eyebrows like an old man.

"I'll give you something hard," she said when she'd regained her breath, trying to hide her embarrassment by shaking a fist under his nose.

Darien compressed his lips as though he was suppressing the urge to laugh, but his eyes seemed to darken a shade. Serena tilted her head, covalent bonds forgotten as she examined them. Then a gust of wind kicked up and sent her worksheets soaring. She squeaked, and they both lunged for the papers before they could blow out onto the street.

"Chemistry?" Darien looked at the worksheet he held.

Serena hopped up to grab it from his grasp and put it in her notebook with the sheaf of runaway papers that she had captured. "Yes."

"Want me to check it for you?"

She looked at him. "You're my…um – " She blushed, averting her eyes for the rest of her sentence, "Boyfriend. Not my tutor." Her eyes flicked back to his, and she felt a panicked urge to add, 'Right?'

But he was smiling at her again.

"I'm very good at multitasking," he told her, as he pulled her closer to him with one hand and took her notebook from her with the other.

They sat down at the picnic table. His right arm was against her back, sneaking around to encircle her waist and hold her notebook in front of them. As she tried to keep from overheating at the warm weight of his arm, she realized that he was left-handed; he traced his progress across the worksheet with a pen in his left hand.

She made another realization, too: he was even more amazing than she had already thought. He was checking the chemistry problems even faster than her teacher did, and in his head.

_'He's being wasted in Roppongi_.' She didn't know whether the sad thought was her brain's or her own. Perhaps for once they were in accord.

At some point in her musing, Serena relaxed unconsciously, leaning into the cradle created by Darien's arm and shoulder. There was a spot beneath his chin where her head rested and where she could feel the warm, calm pulse of his throat against her temple.

She felt very different than when Seiko held her on the bus. Seiko pulled her tight. Too tight. Like a trap. Darien's arm was loose. A bracelet, not a handcuff. His jacket was a little heavy between them, his collarbone a little sharp, but she liked that because he felt like this because he was Darien. His jacket was practically a part of his body, and he probably didn't eat as much as he should because he seemed like the sort of person who would get so caught up in doing something that he would forget to eat because he was Darien and she liked him because he was Darien and because… and after a while she stopped trying to figure out why it was and just settled for enjoying that it was, watching his fingers trace the pen across the paper.

Too quickly he finished. When she felt him straightening, a sound of protest escaped her before she realized it. She blushed hard and peeked up from beneath her eyelashes to see if maybe he hadn't heard her. She found him smiling that soft, almost dreamy smile down at her again.

"Don't worry," he said, shaking his head abruptly. "You've only got one problem to fix. It's mercury, which is diatomic in this specific case. They're tricking you. See? So it needs to be four hundred and two grams in the denominator instead of two hundred and one, does that make sense?"

He stood up and handed her the pen.

Her fingers closed automatically around it as she looked up at him. "Wait – She swallowed her exclamation point hastily. "Are you leaving already?"

He grimaced. "I have to meet someone."

"Oh." Serena looked back down, trying to rearrange her expression so that her disappointment was not so obvious.

A calloused hand appeared on the bench beside her leg. She looked back up and found Darien kneeling in front of her. Kneeling – why was he kneeling?

And why did his face look so sad?

"Sorry."

His voice was soft. Discouraged. Serena knew discouragement too well herself not to be able to recognize it in his voice. She wanted to take it away from his voice, smooth it away like the crease between his brows.

"I shouldn't have taken so long." He was talking to her knees, his head bowed. "I'll try to come Friday – but I might not be able – you don't have to wait for me – "

Serena leaned forward. Placed her hand on the side of his face and lifted it up. With her thumb she stroked his silken hair from his temple.

His eyelids fell shut. He pressed his head closer against her hand.

Gradually, the pulse in his temple beneath her thumb slowed. Warmth flooded her, she felt so happy and yet she felt about to burst into tears…

His eyelids parted again. He looked at her, wordlessly.

She continued to stroke his hair without speaking. Abruptly, inexplicably, she felt strong. As though she was holding him up.

At last he lifted his hand to clasp hers. He pulled it from the side of his face. She curled her fingers inside his warm calloused ones as he leaned forward and kissed her.

His lips were soft, warm – and quickly gone. Her eyelids fluttered back open as he stood, letting go of her hand.

"I really have to go," he said.

But before even a glimmer of uncertainty could enter her – perhaps she should have kissed him back, perhaps she had bad breath, perhaps he didn't like her anymore – he leaned back down and pressed another kiss to the top of her head.

Then he was gone, the courtyard as empty as her locket, and she heard the roar of his motorcycle down the street.

L

"Most impressive, Miss Tsukino." Hisaya-sensei placed the graded quiz on Serena's desk. "I'm very pleased by the improvement you showed on this quiz. Keep it up."

Serena swallowed the hugely triumphant grin that wanted to break her face in two and smothered it to a polite smile instead.

She slid the quiz, with its large 98% at the top, into her folder to remind her to thank Darien the next time she saw him. Maybe she could even show it to her parents, and they could be so impressed that they would let her go see Mina after all. She'd never gotten such good grades, after all, at least not since she'd made the cheerleading squad…

_'Yeah, sure,'_ thought her brain. _'Keep dreaming.'_

Serena was all too happy to listen to it, for once. She sank quickly into delightfully tingly daydreams of how very soft Darien's lips had felt, and the lovely way he teased her and the even lovelier feeling of being able to tease him back –

"Um…Serena-san?"

Serena jumped, banging her desk with her knee, and blushing madly. "Um – um – yes?"

She spun around to answer the voice. Halfway through the spin her embarrassment was eclipsed by anxiety. Who was talking to her? No one talked to her in class since Mina had left…

"Um, I couldn't help but notice…" It was Mizuno-san, the dark-haired girl who sat behind Serena and always made perfect scores. "You got a really good grade on the quiz, and… I was wondering if you knew how to do number 6?"

"Um, yeah!" Serena fumbled her quiz back out of her folder.

A sense of surrealism was sweeping over her: Mizuno-san asking _her_, Serena Tsukino, for help with science… "Number six – oh."

She glanced at Mizuno-san's answer sheet, where the stoichiometry problem was written neatly out. "Mercury is a diatomic molecule here, so you have to remember to multiply the mass times two."

"Oh!" cried Mizuno-san, eyes lighting up. She grabbed a pencil and corrected the problem on her quiz in neat, small handwriting. "I didn't realize! Thank you, Serena-san!"

"No problem," said Serena, grinning. "It's a tricky question. I totally wouldn't have gotten it if my, um, boyfriend hadn't just shown me how to do it."

"Oh." Mizuno-san's eyes were round. "I didn't know that Seiko-san took chemistry."

Serena's smile faltered slightly. "No, no, Seiko's not my boyfriend," she said, waving her hand slightly. "He doesn't go to this school."

"Really?" Mizuno-san's eyes were even wider. "I'm very sorry, Serena-san! I thought that – um!"

The bell rang, then, and Mizuno-san shot to her feet, hurriedly putting her things into her bag. "Thank you very much, Serena-san, I – "

She paused then. "Aren't you coming to lunch, Serena-san?"

Serena tried to stop the flush from touching her cheeks as she took her sandwich from her bag. She hadn't gone to the lunchroom to eat with everyone since the lost football game for which half the school had blamed her. She smiled at Mizuno-san. "No, I'm going to eat here!"

"Oh." Mizuno-san hesitated suddenly, her hands turning white around her bag. "Then – then…could I eat with you, Serena-san?"

It was Serena's turn for her eyes to widen. "Um – um – yes!" She laughed. "That would make me really happy, Mizuno-san!"

L

"Okay, you can look now."

Serena opened her eyes and pulled the helmet from her head. She looked at the place to which Darien had brought her – the Crown Arcade.

She sat forward on the motorcycle to dig her chin into his shoulder and grinned predatorily at him. "You don't know what you've gotten yourself into."

Darien flashed his teeth right back at her, although he managed to look much more predatory than she had. At least according to the goose bumps that shivered down her spine. "Bring it."

Once the motorcycle was parked, Serena made a beeline through the electric doors straight to the Dance Dance Revolution game.

"Whoah, wait!" said Darien as he saw this. "THAT?"

Serena grinned and made a clucking sound. "Bawk-bawk-bawka…"

"Who are you, Buji?" Darien demanded. "Mortal Kombat first."

"Sailor V."

"Mario Brothers."

For the sake of continuing the argument, Serena wrinkled her nose even though she _adored _Mario and Luigi, especially because Mario rather reminded her of a mustachioed Buji. "Ping-pong!"

"Air hockey."

"Deal!"

They pushed in the coins and grabbed the mallets. Serena eyed Darien's long arms, knitting her brows at how easily he would be able to reach practically his whole half of the table. '_Never mind that. We can take him,'_ insisted her brain.

She rolled her shoulders and leaned over the table herself.

"Sure you don't want a handicap with those short arms?" Darien asked, cocking a black brow at her.

"You'll be wishing you had these short arms when I'm through with you," Serena tossed back, unable to keep a delighted grin from breaking through her threatening expression. Trash-talking was so fun! "Bring it on, Bike Boy!"

Darien snorted at this. Unfortunately, he did it at the same moment that he was hitting the puck, and it threw off the force that he had put into it.

Serena swiped up the slow-moving puck and hooked it straight into the slot on his side of the table with one swift motion.

Darien's eyes flicked down to the puck clattering through his slot. Then back at her. He blinked.

"I learned that from baton twirling," Serena told him proudly.

Darien hooked a smirk. "Eye-hand coordination like that and you can't keep from running into candy shelves?"

"Long arms like that and you can keep up with short arms like these?"

The puck was out of the slot, and the game was on again. Darien won the next round, Serena the following one, Darien the one after that, and so on, until twenty sweaty minutes later Serena won, 7-6.

"Mwaha!" she crowed, throwing down the mallet and clapping her hands.

"Are you going to break into a cheer?" Darien swiped the sweat from his forehead with the inside of his wrist, grinning at her.

"Maybe I WILL," she said, striking a pose. She dropped it just as quickly, though, pushing her hair out of her face and wiping her own face. Why did her meetings with Darien always seem to somehow involve her being horribly sweaty? "Except there aren't any words that rhyme with Darien."

Darien set down his own mallet and came around the table to stand beside her. "Yeah, because so many words rhyme with Serena."

The warmth that she felt radiating from his body felt like it was thread hooking through her body to sew her tighter to him; she felt herself leaning toward him ever so slightly. She shook her head and tried to think of something besides hugging him.

"Carrion, ferrying…harryin'?" she wondered hurriedly aloud. She drawled out the endings to make them rhyme with 'Darien' and began to tap her chin as the quest for a rhyme engrossed her. "Larryin', marryin' – "

She stopped and blushed.

"What was that?" Darien cocked a knowing brow at her. He also took a step closer to her.

"Ummm…" stammered Serena; she took a step backward, but as if he was indeed connected to her by a series of stitches, this movement only brought him another step closer to her.

His eyes sparkled suddenly; his arm looped around her waist, and suddenly he swung her up, her feet leaving the ground for a split second, and then she found herself deposited in front of the Ninja Turtle game.

She blinked at the dark screen. Their reflections looked back at her, hers surprised and his sly.

"Rematch?" he asked, lifting a brow with a wide grin.

"How rude!" she declared, rocking up on her tiptoes so she could grab his ear and pull it.

"How would you feel if I picked you up without warning you?"

Darien snapped playfully at her hand with his teeth as she tried to reach his ear. "I don't think that's a scenario we have to worry about."

"Hmph!" Nimbly avoiding his teeth, Serena's fingers darted in and tapped him on the nose.

He grabbed her fingers with his hand instead and tugged her in front of him. He placed her hand on one of the joysticks and covered it with his own. "Donatello or Raphael?"

His chin was atop her head; instead of turning to look up at him, she met his eyes in the reflective screen. "I like Michelangelo."

Darien laughed, tilted his head to muss her hair with his nose. "You would. Too bad his nunchaku wouldn't hurt a fly."

"Would too!" Serena protested.

"We'll compromise." He nudged her hand to the blue button. "Leonardo."

"He's so bossy," Serena complained but pressed it anyway.

Bossy or not, Leonardo's twin swords made quick work of the lowly Foot Ninja. Or maybe that was Darien's speed with the controls. Serena began to jab the jump button over and over again just to giggle at Darien's groans when the impromptu air somersault sent Leonardo into an open manhole.

"Too bad you didn't bring Buji," she observed at one point. She hadn't seen the dark-haired boy since she first saw him in Roppongi, and she missed him and Lita almost as much as she missed Mina. "He could have been Michelangelo."

Darien said nothing. But only a few moments later his hand slowed on the joystick. Serena noticed and began trying to make up for it, yanking it back and forth and pounding the attack button vigorously to keep Leonardo alive. But his lives soon ran out.

She let go of the joystick, feeling his chin leaving the spot between her hair buns. Cooler air replaced his warmth.

"You have to go."

It wasn't a question. In the past few weeks, even though she had only been able to see Darien a handful of times, she had come to recognize the shift in the atmosphere when he was about to leave.

In the screen's reflection he smiled regretfully at her. "Yeah. Sorry."

She shook her head, turning around to face him. "That's okay. I know you're busy..." Disappointed as she was, she had never quite been able to forget the look on his face that day in the school yard, so quietly despairing. If only she could be with him, always keep that look from his face –

"Can I come with you?"

He jerked so violently that his elbow rammed into the game console behind him. He hissed, and Serena thought that it was from pain. But then she saw that his eyes were stabbing into her.

"No," he enunciated through gritted teeth. And there was that look again on his face, suddenly ragged and bare like torn skin –

"Okay," said Serena quickly. She grabbed his hand, pressed it between her own. As though it was a flower that she could preserve, could keep from wilting and losing the color that made her think that it was so beautiful.

A sigh gusted from between his lips, rustling her bangs as she stared at his calloused hand between her own soft ones. He pulled her head into the cove of his neck. The union between his lips and her forehead was a single warm point of contact between them.

He spoke there, against her skin. "It's not safe."

'_Not safe_,' Serena's brain echoed, but she could not tell if it was agreeing with him or expressing its disdain.

She knew that he was right, that Roppongi was dangerous. But surely if she was with him it would be alright? And even if it wasn't alright…a deep longing chewed on her insides. A longing to be part of the family that Darien and Buji and Lita and Asanuma composed. To see Buji and watch Power Rangers with him. To find out how Lita's relationship with Motoki was. To be made fun of by Asanuma, even. And most of all, to see Darien – if not every day then at least more often than the handful of short visits that he was able to make every few days.

Her fingers tightened around his.

"Please," she whispered against his locket.

For a moment he was still.

Then he slid his head down so that they were forehead to forehead.

She stared bravely into his very close-eyes, refusing to blink… or to be hypnotized by those golden flecks that glowed like stars in his midnight irises.

Slowly Darien closed his eyes. His eyelashes taunted the sensitive skin of her cheeks.

At last he opened them again. "Fine."

Like a wave crashing onto a rock and splashing over it, a grin of rapture broke onto her face. He grinned back involuntarily, his lips quirking upward before he ironed them flat again.

He pulled away and headed for the door, tugging her with him.

"This is only for a little while," he warned her as he twisted around on the motorcycle to rearrange the helmet on her head to his satisfaction. He frowned, regarding her, then shrugged out of his leather jacket and put it around her.

She hugged her arms in close to her sides, refusing to put her arms through the jacket as he held it. "You'll be cold!"

"_You_'ll be cold," he returned, plucking at the thin fabric of her school coat. He glared at her. "I'm not taking you with me unless you wear the jacket."

Serena grumbled and pushed her arms through the jacket. He grinned for a moment, then his face creased into a glare again.

"I'm not going all the way back to Roppongi," he told her. "I have to meet someone."

"Okay," agreed Serena, quite agreeable now that she had gotten her way. She returned his glower with a grin and didn't even bother to be surreptitious as she cupped his jacket's sleeves in front of her nose and breathed in deeply with a little shiver of delight.

He made a strange sound, and she looked up just in time to glimpse the small grin on his face before he turned around and started the motorcycle.

Serena's smile behind the leather sleeves grew wider. She wrapped her arms around his waist, content with the fact that his face wasn't desolate anymore and with the confidence that this was a step of progress, no matter how small. She would persuade him to let her come to Roppongi sooner or later.

Preferably sooner.

The trip took fifteen minutes. Plenty of time for Serena's brain to point out to her that she had insisted on following her gang-leader boyfriend along on what was probably an illegal deed for which she would probably be considered an accomplice and put in jail.

But it didn't. Her brain was quiet, speaking up only to remind her that her parents would be even angrier than their current stubbornly silent steaming if she stayed out past sunset. Perhaps her brain, like her, had come to realize that even if Darien was in a gang, he wouldn't do anything truly bad.

The innocuousness of their destination, a shopping plaza on the east end of town, only encouraged this conclusion.

Serena looked around curiously as Darien pulled into a parking space in front of an electronics superstore.

He climbed off, removing his helmet. "Stay here."

She nodded at him, watching his face shutter as he turned away from her. Hugging his jacket closer around her, she slid down the leather bike seat to sit in the valley left warm by his body, and watched him stride across the crosswalk in front of a craft shop.

What could he be up to in a mundane place like this; what could be happening here that could make his face turn into stone like that? She felt a fierce protectiveness welling inside her and found herself looking around again, glaring from behind her helmet visor at the old ladies and bickering families pushing carts across the parking lot, as though they were the ones who threatened him.

Above her, the streetlights suddenly flicked on. She shivered and turned her attention back to the craft store, searching for Darien.

After a breath-stealing moment of being unable to see him, she found him standing next to a payphone, talking to a grungy-looking man with grey-streaked hair.

A hobo? she wondered, but why would his stance be so tense and his face so stiff over a homeless person? Or perhaps it was a druggie… panic filtered through her insides.

_'Idiot_.' Her brain's voice was faint but audible. _'Have his eyes ever been bloodshot? Does he wear sunglasses? Do his hands tremble?'_

No, no, and no. Serena relaxed. How horrible of her to assume such a thing of Darien. Just because he was from Roppongi, because he had a tattoo and rode a motorcycle… she was just like her parents. Just like everyone.

She pulled the helmet from her head. Guilt was so hot in her mouth that she thought she might be sick with it. No wonder Darien hadn't wanted to bring her along. Had he been afraid of what she might think of him, of what she might accuse him? He had known her better than she had known herself…

Her eyes lifted from the asphalt back to Darien and the shady man. Darien's face was even worse than before; his expression looked as hers must have, twisted as though about to be sick. Concern jolted her insides.

Only when a car horn honked behind her did she realize that she was on her feet, half climbing from the motorcycle – about to run and pull Darien away from the man who was making him look so unhappy.

The car horn had pulled their attention to her, too – Darien's eyes met hers. He flicked them quickly away. She rocked back a step, but now the man was looking at her, too,

She shoved herself back down on the bike, bruising her rear end in her haste, and averted her eyes to pretend that she was looking at the flashy silver car cruising through the parking row on her other side. Belatedly she remembered that she had taken off her helmet, and she jammed it back on her head.

She was still staring determinedly at it when a shadow fell over her a few moments later. She looked up and saw Darien. His face still had that look on it.

She scooted back to make room for him to sit, which he did. He started the bike, Serena put her arms around his waist, and they zoomed from the parking lot with a speed he hadn't used since the night of the bonfire.

When they stopped at a red light a few blocks away, Darien finally spoke. "So?"

Serena struggled free of her thoughts. "So?"

"So aren't you going to ask what I was doing?"

"Uuummm…" Serena pondered her response. If only she could see his face. "I would, but I don't think you'll tell me." She tightened her arms, using a joking tone. "Besides, I love you, but I don't want to go to jail for helping you break laws."

"Believe it or not, that wasn't illegal," began Darien. The irony in his voice was so bitterly sharp that it cut through her helmet without losing any of its edge.

But then he stopped abruptly.

Thinking that he had just lowered his voice, not that he had stopped altogether, Serena leaned forward, pushing her chin over his shoulder to hear him. Only then did she realize that he wasn't talking at all, and she looked around, trying to find something that must have distracted him. But she only saw other cars, an SUV, a blue convertible, the silver car from the parking lot.

"What is it?" she asked.

The light changed, and he shook his head as he lifted his foot from the asphalt to press the gas again. "Nothing."

They sped down the street again, ending conversation. Serena furrowed her brow inside her helmet, replaying their conversation in her head –

And suddenly blushed hotly from head to toe.

_'Exactly, stupid.'_ Her brain sighed. _'You said you loved him.'_

Serena squeaked.

They pulled up in front of her house, and Serena scrambled off the bike so quickly that her skirt got tangled in the piping. Then she had to stand stock still for five excruciating minutes, her face aflame with mortification under the helmet and growing hotter by the minute, as Darien fought the material free of the gears.

"There," he said at last, straightening up.

Serena spun, wanting only to run into the house and hide for a thousand years, preferably to be reincarnated into a less embarrassment-plagued future self.

But his hand caught hers and spun her back around.

"Hey, don't you think you're forgetting something?" he said, hooking another of his grins down at her.

Serena didn't know how much longer it would be before the capillaries in her cheeks just exploded, they were flaming so red.

"Oh, yeah," she squeaked, pulling off her helmet and hurriedly shaking her hair out so that it would – hopefully – cover her face. She turned –

Only to be caught again, this time around the waist.

"Not what I meant," Darien informed her, leaning down to be level with her face.

She squeaked again and turned it resolutely away.

But then his fingers were on her chin, and the amused atmosphere evaporated from around him. "Serena – are you okay?" Immediately his hand went to her forehead. "You're burning up."

Serena's shoulders slumped. There was no hiding it anymore. She turned her head slowly to face him, looking up at him with her flushed face.

One look at her expression was all it took. The concerned crease between his eyebrows vanished and became a smile again. "Oh, Odango." He let go of her chin and forehead and slid his hands down her arms to her hands, pulling her into him.

Serena's flaming face and racing heart finally calmed as she stood with her temple against that comforting pulse in his throat.

His chin rested on her hair. "You were embarrassed, huh?"

This was not exactly the sort of thing up to which one liked to own. But Serena nodded against his jacket.

They were both silent for a moment, and she felt his pulse against her own in her temple. The pulse was faster than normal, but whether that was her pulse or his she didn't know. Perhaps both. She hoped both.

After a while she felt a kiss against her hair. Her limbs shivered limp. His lips brushed the top of her ear, and the shivers spread, like puppet strings pulling her head up and back.

This second kiss was soft and warm and longer than the first one.

When he pulled away, he murmured, "_That_'s what I meant."

A smile lit Serena's face; it felt goofy and soft as a marshmallow on her lips. How very embarrassing, she thought, trying to pull it from her face, but his soft lips closed around her again. "God, Serena," he breathed against them, and she felt like a marshmallow all over again. Melting, melting…her hands clung to his shirt like goo as her limbs liquefied beneath her.

Behind them suddenly came the sound of a door opening. Serena's fingers fisted in Darien's jacket, annoyed by the interruption; then the shrieking of her brain penetrated her awareness. _'That's your front door! Your front door! Your dad! Your dad!'_

Darien's lips had already left hers. His hands had let go of hers, too. She opened her eyes to look up at him for a split second that seemed more like an eternity before she turned around.

Her father stood in the doorway outlined by the light from the living room. "Time to come in, Serena."

Serena's face was as hot as Tabasco sauce, but she turned back to Darien for a minute.

His eyes met hers. Reflected in them she saw her knitted brows, and felt slightly surprised the realization of her own anger, but more surprised by the sad acceptance that shadowed his face.

He nodded toward the house. "You should go."

"I have to tell you goodnight first," she said stubbornly, arguing not only with him but with her brain. She had told her parents that Darien was her boyfriend. She had not been doing anything wrong. Kissing her boyfriend was not wrong.

"So." She found his hand again and squeezed it. "Good night."

If the resignation that had been on his face a moment ago had surprised her, it was nothing to the shocked thrill that ran through her at the pride that was suddenly glowing in his eyes as he looked down at her. All that warm, warm pride, just for her. Her breath caught in her lungs.

"Good night," he murmured back. He squeezed her hand back, then released it.

Reluctantly – oh so reluctantly – she took a step back, and he watched her as he put his helmet back on.

"Oh!" she realized suddenly as she watched him lean over the handlebars. "Wait! I did forget something! Your jacket – "

He turned his head toward her, lifted his helmet visor just high enough for her to see his eyes, still glowing. "Keep it for now."

She smiled as she watched him rev the engine and roar down the street.

Then her father's voice reached her ears, carefully controlled and modulated. "Get in here, Serena."

She tore her eyes from Darien's retreating headlights and forced them to her father's stony face. Darien's jacket felt very heavy and very warm on her shoulders.

Her father frowned down the street, then down at her, at the jacket on her shoulders. "Does he want to wake the whole neighborhood?"

She drew the jacket tighter around herself. "Daddy, it's not even eight o'clock. No one's sleeping yet."

Her father's brows knit together disapprovingly as he followed her inside. "Your boyfriend may take that mouth from you, young lady, but I won't. Go to your room."

Serena almost sighed – then caught it just in time, knowing it would rile her father further. Quietly as a mouse she made her way up the stairs.

_'You could have handled that better,'_ her brain reproached her as she shut the door behind her. _'You should have just kept your mouth shut.'_

Serena's shoulders slumped. Yes, she knew that she should have kept her mouth shut. If she hadn't known better than that, her father would have withdrawn her from public school and had her mother teach her at home years ago.

But it was becoming increasingly difficult to go from fearlessly being herself and speaking her thoughts at school with Ami and Rei and afterward with Darien, to being mutely submissive to her parents. To return to the person she had been each day when she walked through the front door was like trying to stuff a butterfly back into its cocoon.

_'Then try harder,'_ warned her brain.

Serena sighed, sitting down at her desk and taking the gold nail polish from her drawer to apply yet another layer to her locket.

L

"Wow, where'd you get that jacket from, Serena? The dumpster?"

"Wow, where'd you get that insult from, Kim? The dumpster that calls itself your brain?" Rei shot back.

A snort of laughter escaped Serena.

On the other side of the lunch table, Ami frowned as Kim made an outraged sound and flounced away with her entourage of cheerleaders toward the football players' table. "I don't see why you insist on goading her, Rei. It just encourages her."

"No, what encourages her is Serena wearing that jacket to school," said Rei, thumping her crutch emphatically on the lunch room tile. Since the brunette had begun sitting with them at lunch, Serena and Ami had sat on the other side of the table in order to give her plenty of room to bang her crutch around, which she did frequently. "I understand you can't help liking the mobster, Serena, but do you have to advertise it?"

_'That's what _I _said!'_ exclaimed Serena's brain.

Serena traced the ragged silver wolf embroidery that had been sewn to the jacket right over where Darien's heart would be. It was her favorite patch on the whole jacket.

"But it's so warm," she said. Then, after a pause, she added, "And it smells really good."

Ami put a hand to her mouth in a gesture that Serena had learned meant that she was hiding a laugh. Rei snorted outright. Serena made faces at both of them.

"I WAS going to let you smell it," she told them, "but if you're going to make fun of me, I guess I won't."

Ami's hand couldn't contain her laughter anymore; a gale of them escaped her mouth. Rei rolled her eyes, but she was snickering, too, and Serena grinned at both of them, feeling pleasure fill her like warm butter. She had thought after Mina moved to America she wouldn't find another friend to sit at the lunch table and laugh with. Yet here she sat with not one but two.

She snuggled into her jacket and felt like the only thing that could make this moment any better was Lita and Darien and Asanuma and Buji being here, too.

L

Coach blew her whistle. "That's good! We're finished for today. Arina, make sure you ice that knee!"

Serena levered herself back up from her split on the gymnasium mats and picked up her baton, a curl of hair falling into her face. She blew it out of her eyes and began to follow the rest of the girls out of the gym toward the locker rooms, her eyes on her feet. It had been a lonely practice, with Rei at the doctor's office getting her cast taken off.

_'There's really not much point in staying today_,' her brain reasoned. _'He hasn't come in days, and it's freezing.'_

She bumped into someone's back. "Watch where you're going, Serena," said Yuko's voice.

"Sorry," said Serena, looking up with confusion. Why was Yuko standing in the middle of the doorway – why was _everyone_ standing in the middle of the doorway, for that matter? She pushed up on her tiptoes, trying to see what was wrong, but Yuko moved from in front of her suddenly. Serena stumbled forward.

"Ow, Serena!"

"Stop, Serena!"

"What's wrong with you, Serena? Can't you just be happy for Kim?"

"Sorry – sorry, it was an accident." Serena was blushing brightly as she stood back up from where she'd fallen onto her knees, inadvertently elbowing a few of her teammates in the ribs.

Then she realized what the last person had said, and she looked up. "What?"

Then her eyes landed on what had made everyone stop on the doorway, and she understood. Kim was being pressed against one of the basketball hoop posts by a guy. But not just any guy. Serena recognized the number on the back of his jacket. Seiko.

"What's going on here, girls? Let me through – " Coach's voice rang through the giggles, silencing them abruptly. Serena felt Coach push through the girls behind her, stop next to her, and follow her eyes. Then, "KIM! THAT IS NOT APPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR FOR SCHOOL GROUNDS!"

Serena shied back. She didn't want to be anywhere near Seiko, not even a whole basketball court away from him. She turned, trying to get to the locker room, but Yuko and Arina were in her way. Arina shot her a satisfied look, and Serena turned away from her –

Only to meet Seiko's eyes, twenty meters away.

He watched her. He was leaning above Kim, his arm propped on the post above her head, half-turned to watch Serena. _'No, you're just imagining it_ – ' began her brain, but when Serena flinched to the side, his eyes followed her. His nose had healed back to normal proportions now, but there was something ugly in his face as his lips curved up into a smirk.

This time Serena turned and pushed through the crowd, ignoring the "oomphs" and angry mutters directed her way. She walked quickly to the locker room, limbs stuff. Her brain was trying to tell her that she had nothing to fear from Seiko, that he was fickle and he'd obviously moved onto Kim, and that even if he did still feel something toward her, he wouldn't dare act on it after what Darien had done –

Like a speeding car hitting a pedestrian, her fear rammed into the concern that had already been crossing her mind – Darien hadn't come in a week, hadn't answered any of her phone calls. What if something had happened to him? What if he was dead? What if he was lying in a Dumpster-lined alley somewhere with his life slowly leaking away because he'd lost a knife fight? What if Seiko had been smiling because he had filed a report for assault and had him arrested? What if –

Music blared from inside her locker. Serena jumped in the middle of unlocking it and banged her elbow against the wall behind her.

_'Calm down. It's just your phone._'

Heart still reverberating like a beaten gong, Serena finished unlocking her locker and rummaged for her cell phone. Her heart leapt all over again when she saw that it was Darien's number. She stuffed her pom poms into one hand and unflipped the phone with the other. "_Darien_!"

"Nee-chan?"

Serena's eyes widened. Her pom-poms dropped from her hand as she pressed her cell phone closer to her ear. "_Buji_?"

"The one and only!" chirped the voice on the other end, tinny over a staticky cacophony in the background. "Um, a-are you busy, nee-chan?"

Serena's heart rate was slowing down in a mixture of disappointment and relief. She wished that it had been Darien calling, but she was nearly as happy to talk to his younger brother.

"No, Buji-kun, I'm not busy," she said, her eyes flicking up as the other girls began to trickle into the locker room. Kim was at the head, smirking straight across the room at Serena. Serena turned away, talking into her locker as she cradled the phone between her ear and shoulder so that she could reclasp her locket around her neck. "How are you?"

"I'm okay, nee-chan." He hesitated. She smothered a smile as he said next, with painful politeness, "How are _you_, nee-chan?"

"I'm doing very well, thank you, Buji-kun," Serena answered, returning his solemnity.

"Oh. Good. Um…well…I guess you're wondering why I called…"

"Whatever the reason, I'm glad you did," said Serena honestly. "I haven't talked to Darien in a while. Is anything wrong?"

"_Yes_!" burst out Buji's voice, so loud that Serena flinched. "I know something's wrong, nee-chan, Darien-nii's so worried all the time! But no one will tell me anything!"

Serena's insides began to knot themselves again. Something _was_ wrong. And Darien was probably trying to keep her out of it, not calling her or coming to see her because he didn't want to endanger her, treating her as if she were a child like Buji. Anger began to grow in her, for both Buji and herself. Why couldn't Darien understand that being left in the dark made them both worry more, why couldn't he see –

"I'm scared, nee-chan," Buji's voice whispered.

Suddenly Serena realized what the background noise on the other end of the line was – shrieking and honking horns – and was that breaking glass?

"Buji, where are you?" Her voice came out nearly a shout. She realized as the chatter around her quieted that girls had turned to stare at her; she had half-risen to her feet.

She stood up the rest of the way but lowered her voice, leaning into her locker. "Buji, where are you?"

"I – I'm not sure, nee-chan." Now Buji sounded like he was about to burst into tears. The incredible little boy, he'd been speaking to her politely all this time as if nothing was wrong! She wanted simultaneously to hug him and to strangle him. "There's a lot of people, and it's getting dark, and…"

"Isn't anyone with you?"

"No, I – Ikindofranaway." He said this very fast.

She took a deep breath; she could ask why he had run away _after _he was safe. "Did you call Darien?"

"No." Buji's voice was a whisper again. "I can't."

"Asanuma?" she said, half confused and half frightened.

"I – I can't call them, nee-chan – they're doing something, they can't answer their phones – I was supposed to stay home – "

Serena sucked in a breath. "Buji, can you see any street signs?"

"No, I – I went into the east subway, but I took the wrong train – " His voice dropped to an even quieter whisper, strained and scared. "Nee-chan, I think I might be by the Makaiju Club."

Serena's mouth went very dry. "The Makaiju Club?"

The sound of imminent tears in his whisper was stronger than ever. "Yes. I can see the sign."

Serena knew the sign of which he spoke. She had only learned about the Makaiju Club – both its infamous neon pink, tree-shaped sign and the horrible things that people did there – from hearing about it in the news. Barely a week went past without news of this murder or that rape or this drive-by happening inside or around the Makaiju Club. If the Roppongi ward was a diseased body, the Makaiju Club was the tumor that had blighted it, located deep inside Roppongi and pumping drug dealer and prostitutes throughout the ward.

"Buji, stay there, okay? Stay on the phone with me. I'm going to be there in fifteen minutes, okay? Fifteen minutes."

With shaking hands Serena yanked her wallet and her baton from her locker and threw them into her backpack. She yanked on Darien's leather jacket, then slammed her locker shut, sprinting out of the locker room.

"Do you have money? Do you have enough quarters to stay on the phone with me?"

"Yeah – I think so – "

Serena turned the corner at the school gate so rapidly that she slid on the icy sidewalk and went sprawling. Her butt bone slammed into the concrete hard, jarring the phone from its spot between her shoulder and chin. It went skidding across the pavement. She lunged to her knees, scrambling after it.

"Buji?" She yanked it back to her ear. "Buji, are you still there?"

Only a dial tone.

"No, no, no, no, no," she panted, grabbing the school fence to drag herself back to her feet. She pressed the redial button but received a busy tone, and her heart rate spiked even higher.

She was still wearing her cheerleading uniform, she realized, and outside of the gym and locker rooms her bare legs were _freezing_. But it was nothing compared to how Buji must feel, did he think that she had hung up on him, that she wouldn't come for him?

She glanced around desperately; where were taxis when you needed them? Her eyes landed on a familiar blue head leaning over the bike racks and her heart nearly stopped with relief.

"Ami!" she shouted. "AMI!"

Ami jerked around. "Serena?" she said, eyes wide.

"Ami!" Serena grabbed her hands. "Can I borrow your bike? Please, it's an emergency, I promise I'll get it back – "

"Of course, Serena." Ami was already nodding her head and unlocking her bike from the rack, tilting her head curiously. "But what's wrong –"

But Serena was already throwing her leg over the bike and pedaling. "I'll tell you tomorrow!" she shouted before flying down the streets.

She pumped and she pumped and she pumped, her blood pumping hard in her ears. Stopping at red lights was pure agony; she wanted to scream at the car drivers to stop and let her go, _a little boy was depending on her_, but they were all deaf, shut up in their cozy warm cars, sheltered from the cold and the world –

After ten minutes of pedaling so hard that her thighs and calves were a screaming mass of cramps, Serena was flying through the Roppongi Tunnel. She wasn't extremely sure of exactly where the club was, just that it was a few miles down the same road that ran beneath the Roppongi Tunnel.

But after only a few minutes she began to feel the bike vibrating. The reverberations grew stronger and louder, resolving themselves into roaring, pounding music; the bass shook the asphalt like an earthquake. People and cars and smoke began to choke the run-down street; the spicy smog made Serena dizzy and nauseous as her pedaling slowed.

Through the smoke, a glowing green neon tube in the shape of a tree loomed up out of the fog. Serena braked the bike with a squeal, narrowly missing a woman standing on the street corner in a skirt and little else.

She climbed off Ami's bicycle, stumbling slightly into a broken streetlight's post. She let her forehead rest against the icy, rusty metal for a second before she forced herself back up. With numb, clumsy fingers she unzipped her backpack and took out her ridiculous, glittery cheerleading baton. Then, gripping Ami's bike with her free hand and wishing it had training wheels as she began to list to one side, she began to wheel it down the crowded sidewalk, looking for a pay phone or for Buji's shiny dark hair.

Along with the uncomfortable, disconnected sensation with which the spicy smoke had filled Serena, a sense of déjà vu was invading her. She felt greedy eyes on her, heard footsteps following her. She tightened her fingers around her baton, walking more quickly, wishing quite desperately that she had been intelligent enough to change out of her short cheerleading skirt, at least. _God, please, you have to let me find Buji first, don't let anything happen until I've gotten Buji safe_ –

"Are you looking for someone?"

The voice that came from right beside her ear made her jump. She picked up her pace, trying to outrace it, determinedly not looking at it, but she heard his pace matching hers.

"Look, leave me alone," she said in a voice as close to Lita's as she could manage. Should she threaten him with her baton? "I'm looking for my brother."

_'Your _brother_? What made you come out with that?'_

Serena wasn't sure; it had just popped out. She was very stressed and rather detached from her sense of logic at the moment. Her fingers were sweaty around her baton.

"Please leave me alone," she said in a voice that didn't shake as violently as she had expected it to. Nor, though, was it very audible over the music thumping from the club across the street.

The voice spoke again; she couldn't distinguish what. She mustered a glare to glance over at its owner – her eyes were on him just long enough to see that his hair was dyed an ashy color – then, through the din, she heard the fleeting fragment of a familiar voice shouting.

"Buji!" she gasped, whipping around. She nearly lost her balance, the music thudding in her ear drums, then caught herself against Ami's bike just in time. She broke into a weaving run toward where she had heard his voice, her fingers sweaty around the bike's handlebars.

First she saw the graffittied, dented pay phone first, behind a lady with lots of piercings, then Buji. He was still there, standing with the phone in his hand, just like she'd told him, the dear, dear boy – then she saw the two people in front of him, cornering him and riffling through his battered Pokemon backpack, and fury erupted inside her.

"_Get away from him_!" She bowled into their midst. Ami's bicycle fell with a crash behind her.

She could feel her baton in her hands in front of her, hear Buji's gasp behind her, and see the shadowy faces of the two people leering at them, a man and a woman.

"Nee-chan!" Buji was definitely crying now; his voice was a sob, and the face that he smushed into her leg as he latched onto it was wet. "Nee-chan!"

"THIS is your nee-chan?" sneered the woman holding his backpack. Her voice was so shrill that it was easy to hear her over the music.

Serena squeezed her eyes tightly, then re-opened them again, but the sight in front of her didn't grow any less frightening. The woman, though she looked about Serena's age, had dyed pink hair streaked with blue, a skin-tight red outfit, and the front teeth in the smirk she shot at them were filed to points.

"You were trying to threaten us with _her_?" Now it was the man talking. His hair, Serena saw blurrily, was dyed blue with pink streaks. "That's a joke, kid. But a funny one, because now we'll have BOTH of you to have fun with."

He leered at Serena, and she flinched.

Then she glowered. She wasn't going to be intimidated by a man with a pink streak in his hair!

"I told you to get away from him!" She shook her baton warningly at him, fingers white-knuckled around the grip. Her mouth felt a little bit like it was full of cotton, and her words sounded like they had clumped together a little like cotton candy, but she was pretty sure that at least her threatening tone had been clearly conveyed.

"Oh, isn't she cute, Anne?" The man grinned. "She sounds high as a cloud. And look at that nice locket…"

"Stay away from her!" Buji yelled, but Serena barely heard him, because the boy was reaching out to grab her necklace. She saw his fingers about to close around her locket, then she blinked, and suddenly her baton was spinning in the same movement that they had rehearsed in practice just that afternoon.

She heard a thunk – a sound that she was used to hearing from when she hit herself with the baton, not someone else – and knew from both the thunk's volume and the hissed curse that followed it that the impact had been a painful one.

A little bit of the fuzziness dissolved from her brain. She twirled her fingers faster, making the baton hum in the air, and looked at the boy holding his wrist and glaring at her.

"You should have listened to me," she told him loudly. Her voice was surprisingly steady considering how fast her heart was beating, as though she was still madly pedaling Ami's bicycle.

"Fucking bitch," hissed the woman. She lunged forward, clawing for Serena's baton. Serena took a step backward, right into Ami's bicycle. The bike crashed to the sidewalk in a racket of metal and gears behind her, and Serena crashed backward against the pay phone, fireworks exploding behind her eyes.

A rough weight threw itself into her, crushing her against the rusty metal. Hot, harsh breath panted on her face. When the white sparks faded from her vision a few seconds later, she was staring into red-rimmed, huge-pupiled eyes centimeters from her. Her own eyes stared back at her, wide and scared.

"That baton hurt," the man growled into her face.

A groan escaped from between Serena's clenched teeth. One of his hands was squeezing her wrist so tight her skin was grinding against the bone, and his other arm was pressed against her neck, digging into it until her throat closed. She felt herself gagging.

"Does it hurt? Does it? My arm does. Maybe I'll keep going…or maybe I should break something else so we can have some fun. I was thinking I'd just take that nice locket of yours, but maybe I'll have _you_ instead…"

"S-st– " Terror was a white water rapids roaring through her limbs, pounding the air from her lungs. She couldn't breathe. "St – stop – "

"We don't need your fingers for that, do we? I'll break those instead – " He snatched her fingers, began to bend them backward, backward, his eyes and breath still hot on her face –

"_Stop it_!"

Something crashed against them. Pain shot through her throat as the man's arm was shoved harder against it – then the pressure he was gone; he was stumbling away from her.

Serena nearly fell to the ground, caught herself on her hands. She scrabbled for her grime-spattered baton from the sidewalk, then fought back to her feet. Her eyes whirled in a crazed panic, looking for Buji.

She found him hanging from the man's arm with his teeth clamped into his skin.

For a second, Serena hesitated – she took a step back, toward Ami's bike – then she darted forward and swung her baton with all her strength.

The impact shook her arms up to her shoulders. She heard a muffled cry above the roaring music. Something black crossed in front of her vision. She blinked, saw Buji's dark hair, and grabbed for it. Half-blindly she seized him in her arms. His hands grabbed her jacket, her hair; she held him as tightly as she could with one hand and kept her baton up with the other.

The man was glaring poison at her. Blood streamed down his lip. The side of his face was an angry red welt. He was lunging like a chained dog, snarling something at her, but she couldn't hear it. She stared uncomprehendingly at his lunging movements and then followed the line of his shoulders to a hand gripping the scruff of his shirt.

She followed the hand to a barrel-chested man with a blood-red hair and fierce tattooed biceps protruding from his shirt sleeves. His lips were moving.

Like a radio being brought into reception, the sound from her surroundings finally resolved themselves in Serena's ears.

" – atch it, buddy!" the huge man was saying.

"Let him go, you asshole!" The girl was screaming, and her brother was snarling in the man's grip.

"You know who that is?" The big man had a loud, contemptuous voice, and Serena saw with dim awareness a patch on his sleeve that read _Makaiju_.

_'A bouncer,'_ her brain whispered.

"She won't be anybody when I'm done with her!" growled the man, his eyes burning into Serena's. Serena gripped Buji tighter. Her brain was screaming at her to run. But her lungs were empty as a vacuum.

"You gotta be kidding me," said the Makaiju man in disgust. "How long you been in Roppongi, bitch? You don't know Darien Shields's fucking jacket when you see it?"

The blue-haired man froze. His burning eyes dropped from Serena's to the jacket she wore.

Over the deafening music and her thudding heart, Serena couldn't hear what he said, but she saw his lips move: _Shit._

"Yeah, that's what I said." The Makaiju man let him go. "Ain't every day I see somebody stupid enough to fuck with Shields' girlfriend." He laughed hard and rough. "I suggest you start running!"

"I – I'm not stupid," said the man loudly. His eyes were still on Serena's jacket. She held Buji tighter. "No way she's his bitch. Shields wouldn't go for a little girl like here – "

"MORON!"

The shout came from just below Serena's ear. Serena's heart jumped so violently that it almost popped out of her mouth. She looked down wildly to see Buji had twisted in her arms to glare at the man.

"You think a girl like her would have my nii-san's jacket if she wasn't his girlfriend? Or are you stupid enough to think a little girl could steal anything from the Wolves?"

"Ain't nobody in Roppongi THAT stupid," said Makaiju Man. Then he grinned down at the man. "Nobody who's still alive, anyway."

"Anne!" The man shouted, spinning suddenly and grabbing his sister. "Come on! We're getting the hell out of here."

They both turned and took off into the smoky fog, toward the neon Makaiju sign. Just barely, Serena heard the familiar sound of a motorcycle roaring to life, and then a single headlight cut through the fog and dwindled away in it.

"Yeah, that's right!" Buji yelled after the retreating motorcycle. "Keep running! You SHOULD be scared of my nii-chan!"

"Buji." Serena's voice could have belonged to a corpse. "Don't…"

She didn't say anything more; she thought she might throw up. In addition to the Makaiju man still standing and watching them, a crowd of people were loitering on the sidewalk around them, cigarettes and joints dangling from their mouths and hands as they watched.

"Don't worry, nee-chan." Buji looked up at her with his big eyes and then glared around at the people who watched them. "None of them'll touch you. Those idiots were the only thugs in Roppongi stupid enough not to recognize my nii-san's jacket."

"He's right about that," said Makaiju man. Serena's eyes flicked up to him.

"Ah…ah…" she said faintly. "Thank you."

The man uncrossed his arms and hooked his thumbs in his pants. "Ain't good business to let the girlfriend of somebody like Shields get fucked on your doorstep, you know? Who knows what he'd do?"

"Rubeus!" A voice floated through the fog from the direction of the club.

The Makaiju man grunted and half-turned. Then he turned back to look at them. "Diamante's coming to see what all the noise was about. You better get moving."

The name Diamante triggered a faint alarm of recognition in Serena's mind, but she didn't have the leisure to wonder why. She began to back away from the bouncer, eyes flicking among the people that still watched them, suspicious and scared despite all of Buji and the bouncer's reassurances. Gradually she was becoming aware of how much her throat hurt to breathe, of the pain in her hand. Of how close she had come to –

Buji wriggled out of her tight grip, landing on the sidewalk. "C'mon, nee-chan. Hold onto me, okay?"

Serena's fingers curled into the soft warmth of his hood. Her baton hung listlessly from her other hand as she followed Buji, her eyes suddenly hot and wet. Deep in the safety of her mind she began to wonder drearily why she didn't just drop the baton.

_'What the hell are you doing?'_

She almost spun, almost cried with relief. Lita, Lita was here, she'd come to save them –

_'No, she hasn't.'_ The road around them was empty of tall, well-endowed saviors. Only lit cigarette ends and curious eyes followed them.

Serena had never been so disappointed to hear her brain.

_'You're not the only one who's disappointed. What the _hell_ are you doing?'_

Serena blinked back the cooling tears from her eyes, looked around her again. She was following after Buji, her fingers curled tightly into his hood as he led them down the sidewalk. His arms were stretched up to hold the handlebars of Ami's bike as he wheeled it along with them, the gears clicking as his head turned to and fro to scan the street.

Immediately she understood. Shame and self-loathing swept through her. Her hand dropped from Buji's jacket.

He turned around quickly. "Nee-chan?" His eyes were huge, pupils dilated. "Are you okay?"

Serena bit her lip, hard. "I'm fine, Buji-kun. Thank you for…" She hesitated. "For being the adult."

Buji smiled at her. A bruise was beginning to darken his cheek, just below his eyes. He'd gotten that from saving her.

"You were really brave, nee-chan."

Serena's eyes flicked from his bruise to his eyes, almost guilty. Buji didn't know how she had hesitated, how she had almost run away and left him.

She said only, "I'll take the bike now, Buji-kun."

Her hands were still shaking, but she managed to lift him into the wire basket that Ami had on the back of her bike to hold textbooks. Then she climbed on herself, keeping the baton balanced in one hand, and she began to pedal.

Unexpectedly, Buji wrapped her arms around her waist to hold on. She flinched so violently that the bike almost tipped over.

Buji pulled back, but she said tightly, "No, it's okay, Buji-kun." And she tried to erase the memory of that man's body crushing against her by focusing on the feel of Buji's chubby little-kid arms pressed against her stomach.

Even after they were blocks away from the pumping music of Roppongi, Serena's eardrums throbbed. She shook her head as she squinted through the fog, studiously avoiding the eyes of all the people on the sidewalk through whom she wove on the bike. Once she felt her baton clip someone, and she immediately poured even more speed onto the pedals, frightened of retaliation, but true to Buji's word, nothing happened. People stared at them, but no one chased them.

But the agitation churning inside her did not abate. Even when the vague outline of the Roppongi tunnel finally loomed out of the foggy darkness, Serena's heart continued to pound frantically. With the question of how to get out of Roppongi's center district set to rest, she was now faced with the question of where, after leaving it, she was going to pedal _to_.

She smelled like cigarette and marijuana smoke, bruised and scraped. Her house was obviously out of the question. She couldn't show up on Rei's doorstep like this either; he dad was a policeman and would recognize the smell of joint smoke on the spot. Ami's apartment was an option because her mom often worked off hospital shifts, but if Dr. Mizuno was home, she would recognize the smell too, and Serena couldn't get Ami into trouble like that.

And another worry churning inside her – what would Darien do when he got home from wherever he was and found Buji gone?

"Where are we going now, nee-chan?" Buji's voice behind her was sleepy. His arms around her waist were loosening inch by inch, the memory of the man's fingers on her skin returning.

"We're going home," said Serena firmly, determined not to let him see her uncertainty. He'd been through enough tonight. _I just don't know yet where home _is.

She didn't realize that she had mumbled this out loud until Buji yawned, "Home is where Darien is."

Then he straightened abruptly against her back. "No!"

Serena's surprised flinch nearly threw them into the wall of the Roppongi Tunnel. She gasped and righted them.

"Sorry!" Buji cried out. "But you can't take me home, nee-chan! I ran AWAY!"

Serena's legs were tiring; she slowed down her pedaling, letting momentum carry them through the rest of the dark tunnel, out onto the dimly-lit street. For a stab of a second, as her muscles cramped angrily and the memory of the man snarled hot and foul inside her, she wanted to yell at the little boy, to shake him and demand what he had been thinking, running alone into the heart of Roppongi? She wanted to scare him, make sure he _never _did it ever again –

"Buji – " Desperation wasn't an undercurrent in her voice, it was a white water rapid roiling her words. " – _why _did you run away?"

The chubby arms around her waist tightened. She heard him take a breath –

Then a motorcycle roared wildly around the corner and sped straight toward them, its single headlight blinding in the dark.

Serena's heart leapt into her mouth. She scrambled from the bike. She caught Buji before he could tumble into the road; Ami's bike crashed to the curb.

Serena gripped her baton and grabbed Buji by the shoulders, tightly.

"Go _home_," she told him, her voice so tight that it seemed to choke them both. She could see her own eyed reflected wide and scared in his for the instant that she took to stare at him.

Then she spun around, for the roaring was very close, and held her baton shaking but ready, waiting for it to stop.

And stop it did. With a scream of brakes, the motorcycle arrested its motion so suddenly that it spun nearly parallel to the icy street, then crashed into the slush that lined the curb as its helmeted rider sprang from it to grab Serena by the arms.

She cried out and swung her baton hard. The memory of his weight burned on her abdomen –

The man doubled over with a choked exhalation. Breathing raggedly, Serena whirled for a split second to make sure that Buji was far away –

He wasn't.

He stood right behind her, staring at the man behind her.

"Buji!" So help her, if he was going to shout insults at this man, too – she felt an inch from tears again; her voice came out shrill with disbelief and despair. Was this how Darien had felt, trying so hard to keep them safe when they refused to cooperate? "RUN!"

"Nee-chan," Buji began, but at the same time the man behind her rasped something. She spun back around, baton gripped tight –

And saw, as the man tore off his helmet, an unmistakable scarred face.

Like a butterfly alighting on a flower to die, her trembling hand found Buji's shoulder. Distantly she felt herself sinking to the icy pavement.

No sooner had her bare skin brushed the frozen cement that hands caught her beneath the arms. She jerked, lurching, back to her feet, away from the touch. Her fingers curled more tightly in Buji's hood.

"Nii-san," she heard Buji's voice distantly.

Then Darien's, as tight and angry as she had ever heard it. "Buji, get on the motorcycle."

Then Buji's: "No!"

Then her own, faint: "Darien, he's had a long night – "

"He's not the only one!" Darien's voice was sharp and tight now. A chain that wrapped and choked like a noose. "Do you have any _idea_ what I – we got home and you were _gone_ – "

"Shut up!" Buji shouted. Serena's hand was knocked from his coat as his hands flew up to cover his ears.

"Shut up! You don't tell me ANYTHING!" He was crying; his eyes were squeezed up in his grimy, wet little face. "You leave me alone at home and I don't even know where you are, and I don't know if you'll ever come back, you might DIE – "

He sucked in a mucus-choked breath. Serena knew instinctively that he was about to splinter into sobs, and she reached for him. ("Stop it," she vaguely heard herself saying. "Buji, stop.") He did, but not before he managed to blubber out, "I HATE you, Darien! I hate you! And Mom and Dad would hate you too if they knew what you were doing because you're breaking your promise!"

Only then did he let Serena's hands draw him into her arms. He cried noisy tears into her neck, his chin grinding her locket into her skin, kept sobbing "I hate you, I hate you" even as she felt him limpening gradually into sleep.

Only when Buji was silent and still in her arms did Darien speak.

"Give him to me."

Serena didn't move. She only held Buji tighter.

"Where were you?"

"Serena." His hand entered her vision. "Please. I'm sorry you had to come here – "

"Stop it!" Serena spun. "That's not why I'm mad!"

His hand fell down again. He held his helmet in front of him, as though he wanted to put it back on. Then he asked, with weary obedience, as though he was humoring her, "Then why are you mad?"

"You left him." Serena pressed Buji's head closer. Her voice was trembling. "You left him alone and didn't tell him anything – "

"I did that so he would be safe." His voice was flat and cold, the way it had been that first night when he left her on the sidewalk in front of her house. But beneath it throbbed a horrible artery of pain, fresh and bloody like a knife wound. "Everything I'm doing right now, I'm doing so that he'll be safe – "

"How's he supposed to be safe when he's worrying about you?" Serena lashed out. "You never tell him anything – "

"He doesn't need to know!" Darien snapped. "This is almost over! If he would just listen to me – "

"WHAT is he supposed to listen to? You telling him to stay put and be safe? Or do you just walk out without even telling him you're leaving and leave him to wonder where you are for days at a time like you did to me?"

Darien jerked.

For a split second, she thought he was about to hit her. Then, as he put his helmet on the sidewalk, guilt filled her for even thinking that he would do such a thing.

As though he knew what she had been thinking, he reached out and, not even looking at her, not even brushing her hands with his own, took Buji from her slack arms into his own.

The small hands dangled over Darien's bare arms. For the first time Serena noticed that he wasn't wearing a jacket. But before she could say anything –

"Give me your cell phone."

Automatically Serena pulled it from her pocket.

Darien took it with his free hand and pressed a series of keys. Then he handed it back to her. "There's Motoki's number."

"Why…?" Dread was filling her as she watched him swing a leg over his motorcycle.

He set Buji in front of him on the bike, put the overlarge helmet over the child's sleeping head. Without looking at her, he said, "Call him and tell him to come get you and take you home."

Serena had been out in the freezing temperatures for hours now, with nothing to cover her legs or her face or fingers. She had grown as numb as anyone of the brink of frostbite can become.

But his words, slapped her like ice water being thrown into her face, knocked the breath from her as though she had risen from in front of a toasty fireplace to walk into a blizzard.

And all she could think was, '_You knew it was coming. You knew it was coming. No one ever lasts.'_

"Serena." Finally he looked at her. His scarred face was twisted, as though it pained him even to have to touch her eyes with his. "Please."

Fumbling, Serena's fingers found the 'delete' key. She pressed it, erasing Motoki's number.

The phone screen blinked, switched to show a message: 8 MISSED CALLS. CALLER: DAD CELL. She held her thumb down on the disconnect key until the phone shut down with a chime; the screen turned black. In it she could see her reflection, paled and tired and weak. Weak weak weak.

Her lips pursed; for a second she wavered on the brink of mortal terror that she was about to tumble into tears. Humiliating, weak tears.

_"Good night."_ She remembered the glowing pride in his eyes when she held his hand in front of her parents. Remembered her stabbing desire to see that glow again. Not only to see it, but to deserve it.

Her trembling lower lip steadied. "I'm not going home yet."

"Yes." His jaw was granite. "You are. You shouldn't be here."

Serena's heart slid to her toes.

"I'll never be able to repay you for bringing Buji back." Darien's voice was low, the throb nearly contained. "But you shouldn't have had to. You never should've met him. You shouldn't be here."

_Never should've met him?_

The hatred that Serena had felt toward the man and woman in Roppongi was like tepid water compared to what scalded through her now. It burned the tears from her eyes, the nerves from her lips, his face from her vision.

All she could see was his eyes – the eyes that had glowed in pride for her defiance of her father – now glaring at her just like her father's had.

"I never should have met him?" she repeated, with those numb, unfeeling lips. But with each syllable that trickled from her lips, she felt something inside her melting, heating. "I shouldn't _be_ here?" Flaring. Searing. "_Nobody_ should be here! Nobody with even the smallest piece of a heart should be in this horrible place where even people as incredible as you get turned into – into – into horrible blocks of ice who make other people feel like they're not human beings!"

For a moment, silence filled her ears. There was nothing but the sound of her own rough breathing.

And for a moment, hope began to grow in her that he hadn't meant what he had said, that he was going to say, 'You're right, Odango,' and sigh with relief and stop looking so stony and shadowy and unfamiliar –

"You are a human being, Serena." His voice was low. "But I was stupid to think that this could work. Please call Motoki to take you home."

Serena's fury trickled away.

So did her silence. Insults, shouts, kicks, hair-pulling – all of those she could tolerate in silence.

But this rejection, this rejection with a "please" as though she was powerful and he was weak – she couldn't stand it. Tears began to quake her ribs, to escape from her face, from her nose, from her eyes, from her lips.

She swiped at them and climbed onto Ami's bicycle, and if he made a sound behind her she didn't hear it. She pedaled until she couldn't feel her legs, until Roppongi and Darien were blocks and blocks behind her, and she recognized through her tears the streets down which she was streaking on Ami's beaten bike, but all she could hear was Buji's voice, playing over and over, _Home is where Darien is_, until she was crying even more loudly than before and the people on the familiar, well-lit streets looked at her askance and grimaced and frowned or looked away from her.

The house was ablaze with light as she turned wearily into the front drive, careful even in her bone-tiredness to avoid her mother's prized azaleas lining the driveway. She slid from Ami's bicycle and propped it against the side of the garage, then trudged up the walk to the front door.

Only then, as her eyes landed on her parents sitting stiff and silent in front of the eleven o'clock news, did she realize that she hadn't answered any of her dad's eight phone calls, that her cheerleading uniform was wet, filthy, and pasted to her bare legs, that she smelled like marijuana smoke, and that she was still wearing Darien's black leather jacket.

"Get out."

The television was on mute, she realized, as she watched a deodorant commercial full of flowers and rainbows dance across the screen.

With that realization came another: _Oh. That was Dad talking._ And a third: _He was talking to _me.

"What?" she said then, stupidly.

He stood up, and either he was trembling or the water in her eyes was making the world shake. "I said get out. You're not my daughter."

Serena's brain gave a tight, half-hysterical laugh, and so did she. _'This isn't happening.'_

Now her father was taking a step toward her. "You think this is _funny_? Get out!"

"Dad – Dad – " Serena wasn't laughing anymore. "I don't – I can explain – "

"Oh, you can explain? You can explain why Seiko's mother called and told us that Seiko saw you in ROPPONGI?"

Serena was going to throw up.

"And you can explain why Seiko's mother said he doesn't know anyone named Darien except a Roppongi gang member who assaulted him up at a bonfire?" he roared.

"Kenji," said Serena's mother.

"Mom," gasped Serena, relief filling her –

"Do you know what you've done, Serena?" Her mother's eyes were filled with tears, running in neat little trails down her smooth cheeks. "Do you know what sort of reputation you've given to your _team_, much less just you? I didn't – I didn't raise you to be this selfish – " She gasped a little, plucking at her dress, and Serena's father put an arm around her. "We may have spoiled you, I know, we gave you everything you wanted – "

"MOM!" Serena's eyes screwed up, and her voice unscrewed from her mouth, rusty and crumbling like a screw left in wood for too long. "Stop it! Stop!"

"We supported you in everything you wanted to do, all your cheerleading – "

"NO!" Serena cried; she covered her ears, sick of it, sick of listening to lies and agreeing with them. "That's NOT what I wanted to do! That's what YOU wanted me to do, Mom!"

Her mother stopped plucking at her dress and looked up at her. "Serena, that's not true. You've loved cheerleading since kindergarten – "

"No! I went back then because it was something you would actually let me do. The _only_ thing you let me do! And then I went because it was the only time you let me see Mina outside of school, and then when she moved I kept doing it because you told me that if I quit cheerleading it would break your heart. I kept going for _you_!"

"Stop," snapped her father. "You have no right to speak to her like this – "

"Like what?" Serena was still crying, and she hated it.

She hated showing how weak she was because when they saw that she was weak they would offer her a way back into a fold, they would say with soothing voices that if she promised never to do it again she could be part of the family again, and she was such a coward that she would accept it, she would bend and lie and cry and promise –

_"Good night._" She wanted so badly to be proud of _herself_, for once.

She scrubbed the tears from her eyes. "I'm not doing anything wrong." She lifted her eyes, fastened them onto her mother's. "I'm not being disrespectful. I'm just telling you how I feel."

"I don't care how you feel." Her father stepped in front of her mother.

Disbelief and pain lanced through Serena. She stared at her father's cold face. Suddenly she could see the difference between Darien and her father, and she didn't see why she had ever though that they looked alike, for Darien's stiff mask had belied how stricken he was, shown that Buji's words had pained him, affected him – all her father's showed was boiling, hateful anger.

She swallowed, gripped the locket at her throat. Pulled it tight, the chain biting into her skin. "You should care how I feel, you're my _dad_ – "

"GET OUT!"

Serena flinched.

Her shoulder blades hit the front door with a bang. Beside her, the vase on the front table toppled off and shattered around her feet.

She flinched again, hand scrabbling behind her for the doorknob, her mouth, her nose, her eyes, everything wet, and she wanted them all to stop running, but she wanted Mina to be here and Darien to still love her and her parents to not hate her, and none of those wishes were coming true either. In fact, Kenji was shouting something behind her, and then she was finally grasping the doorknob and stumbling, tripping down the front steps, running, running, running, because yet again she had tried to stand her ground and she had fallen.

L

_'You should have brought Ami's bike_,' said her brain at last.

If she had had any breath left over in her burning lungs, if it hadn't hurt like a punch and a stab to inhale the freezing night air, Serena would have laughed. Or sobbed again. Of course she should have brought Ami's bike. Of course she shouldn't have run out into the streets in only her uniform and Darien's jacket. Of course she shouldn't have walked inside the house without thinking of her appearance. Of course she shouldn't have forgotten to call her parents. There were a lot of things that of course she shouldn't have done. Not been born was one of them.

She couldn't feel her toes anymore. At first they had screamed horribly in the cold as they were slapped again and again against the frozen pavement in only her thin practice shoes. But now they were silent, and she wished the rest of her body would follow their example. Her legs still prickled painfully every time her slushy skirt slapped against them, and so did her face, and her fingers, and everything except her chest and arms, tucked inside Darien's jacket.

Her foot skidded yet again on the icy pavement, and she went down hard. Her teeth snapped together as her chin scraped across the wet concrete.

She let her body go limp, just lying on the sidewalk as the cold crawled up through her wet clothes. Her locket was pressed beneath her cheek, and against her skin she could feel the rough nail polish flaking away again. She almost laughed as she remembered that the man in Roppongi had though it was valuable…

It was the sound of sirens in the distance that finally pushed her back up on her elbows. Vaguely she wondered if they were for her, if her parents had called the police and sent them looking for her, and uncertainly she wondered if she wanted to be found.

She pushed herself the rest of the way up, felt brief pressure on her neck, and then heard a snap. She looked down. Her hideous locket sat on the sidewalk, the golden chain from which it had hung lying in two pieces beside it.

Serena looked at it for a moment. Then she climbed gingerly the rest of the way to her feet, leaving the locket on the ground behind her.

But a few slippery steps away she stopped. She turned and looked at the locket. It lay there, gray on the cold gray sidewalk. Abrupt fear gripped her like bruising hands, squeezing the breath from her throat: if she left this locket behind, her parents would never take her back. She would be alone –

Hurriedly, nearly slipping on the icy pavement, she crouched to pick the locket up. But her fingers were numb, clumsy; the locket slid away from them. Rocking forward, her bare knees hitting the icy concrete, she reached for it again. It skittered away once more, slipping over the edge of the curb. Her eyes widened, and she lunged after it, scrabbling.

Like a scene from a bad movie, the locket slid to the edge of the grate in the street and teetered there.

Serena's eyes snapped right and left. The road was deserted. No one was coming from either way. On all fours, lest she slip on the ice and jar the locket through the slats in the grate, she crawled onto the street.

Her numb fingers brushed the metal of the locket, then air as the locket slid away, and she shot her hand after it – straight through the hole in the grate.

Her eyes widened in horror as she looked down at her arm. The locket was in her numb grasp now – but her arm was trapped in the grate up to her elbow. She tugged. Pain lanced up her arm, but nothing loosened.

And now, suddenly, the sirens in the distance were being joined by a much closer sound. The grate around her arm began to vibrate ever so slightly.

She twisted her head. With a sick sense of déjà vu, she saw headlights careen around the corner.

The approaching car's engine growled ferociously as it zoomed crazily down the street toward her, its speakers blaring – and even as she threw up her free arm, trying to make the driver see her, she recognized the deafening music. It was the same heavy rap song that she had been able to hear playing on Seiko's ear buds the day of the game against Minato.

She yanked desperately at her arm. She felt her bone grind against the metal, felt her skin rip, felt a sob tear from her throat. Heard the snarling engine, heard the blaring rap music, heard the screeching brakes –

and then nothing.

L

A/N: I am _begging _you to leave a review for this chapter before moving to the next one. It contains possibly the most rewriting I've ever done, and I really want to know if it paid off, especially in terms of the characters, their conflicts, and interactions.


	4. Chapter 4

A/N: Wow. _Wow_. This story has totally spiralled into something I did not expect.

Please note that I vehemently intended it to be three parts long. But there was simply no way NOT to end last chapter where it did. Therefore, the chapters are now quite grossly disproportioned, and there will be an epilogue, which I detest, but betraying one's principles appears to be an integral part of growing up.

As always, big thanks to Jade-eye for practically being the midwife to this story despite all the crazy work she's had to do.

Disclaimer: I'm starting to think that _nobody_ owns Sailor Moon and company…they're all so headstrong…

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Leather and Lockets

Four

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Hot pain stabbed through the unconsciousness. Suddenly she had a body, and it was doubling like a butterfly pinned to corkboard. More, hotter pain shimmered across her body, seared across her head.

"Sshh, sweetheart, it's alright. I'm just adjusting your IV. It's okay…" A hand touched her shoulder.

She gasped, eyelids flying open, and wrenched away from it.

A cacophony of metallic crashes and plaintive beeps attacked the air.

Serena cringed, then bolted up, eyes darting for Buji. _She_ was the adult, she had to protect him –

White, blue, white met her eyes. Confusion filled her, then slowly drained from her as she realized that she was in a hospital room. She looked down.

Saw a brown-haired woman in scrubs entangled in a jumble of IV stands and wires and tubing.

"Oh, dear," said the woman. "I'm sorry for startling you. It's okay, sweetheart, you're in the hospital. You're safe."

Serena stared at her; slowly, memories began to filter back into her mind. _"Get out!" _A shattering vase. Headlights. Throbbing music.

For a minute the blue-haired man's face wavered in her mind, but then Seiko's replaced it. She looked down at herself. Saw a thin blanket covering one of her legs, saw the other one suspended in a cast; saw her left arm wrapped in a veritable sleeve of gauze and her right arm encased in a straight cast from shoulder to wrist.

The sight seemed to pull back the curtain that had momentarily fallen to conceal her pain. It roared back to the forefront of the stage, searing along nearly ever inch of her limbs, a second skin of agony that pushed tears to the surface of her eyes.

The nurse must have fought her way free of the medical equipment, for she was leaning over Serena now, murmuring quiet reassurances. She picked up Serena's left wrist and clucked. Serena, watching the compression of her lips, followed the woman's brown eyes to her hand, and saw that the skin on the top of her hand had been ripped when the IV was torn out of her skin.

The nurse murmured apologetically, something about needing to keep Serena on pain medications, and turned over Serena's arm. She fiddled with the IV before wiping an area of Serena's skin near her elbow with an alcohol wipe from her smock and reinserting the needle. Serena's eyes, trying to look at anything but the needle, landed on her wrist instead. They widened as she saw the dark purple streaks there. The blue-haired man burrowed into her mind again.

She bit her lip, gagged as she tasted the bitter ointment that covered it.

"Oh, yes." The nurse looked up and straightened, gently setting Serena's arm back down. "Sorry, I should have told you. You're scraped pretty much all over, so don't lick your lips if you don't want to get a mouthful of that first-aid cream, okay? Would you like some water?"

Serena nodded, winced at the pain that shot up the back of her neck into her skull. She quickly arrested the movement and rasped instead, "Yes, please."

The nurse lifted a cup from the table beside the bed and put it to Serena's lips. Serena sipped the lukewarm water at first, then swallowed thirstily, trying to lift her free hand to hold the cup. But the nurse held it down gently, telling her that she couldn't rip out the IV again.

When the cup was empty – and it hadn't even been full to begin with, thought Serena tiredly, her mouth still full with the ointment's bitter taste – the nurse set it back down on the table.

Then she picked up the chart from the end of Serena's bed and, as she began to write on it, said, "The doctor'll be in just a few minutes, okay? There's a button right beside your hand that you can push if you need something, and I'll be right back – "

"…w…wait…!" Serena rasped.

The nurse glanced over her shoulder, her hand paused over the doorknob, smiling encouragingly.

Serena swallowed, for her own outburst had surprised her. She had told herself she didn't want to know, but – "Are – are my parents here?"

The smile faded from the nurse's face. "Oh, well, you're tired." She opened the door. "The doctor will be right in, and I'll get you some more water, okay?"

She left the door open a crack behind her. Serena stared at it and tried to feel angry instead of like crying.

_"I don't care how you feel."_

_"Get out!"_

_"You shouldn't be here."_

Seiko may have done this, this physical damage to her, but what truly hurt, what made her want to tear the IVs from her arms and stumble out into the snow and die, was what she had done to herself.

Serena had known, she had _known_, that saying what she meant, doing what she wanted, would only end with her being alone.

She laughed, a sound choked with tears, because why hadn't her brain asked her then, when she was yelling at Darien, when she was arguing with her parents, why hadn't it asked her _then_ what the hell she was doing?

She laughed and she laughed and she laughed – and then she stopped.

Why hadn't it asked her?

_"Lita, my brain sounds just like you!"_

She remembered saying that. What would Lita have done?

Lita _would_ have argued with Darien. If she had seen what Serena had seen, how tterrified Buji was by Darien leaving him alone, she would have yelled at him. She probably would have kicked his ass. And Lita would never, ever, let her parents parents turn her into something that she didn't want to be.

Serena opened her wet eyes and stared at the bare hospital wall.

That was why her brain hadn't yelled at her.

Because she had done what Lita would have done – what was right.

Serena twisted her head, ignored the pain that stabbed up her skull, and scrubbed her mucus-covered, tear-stained face against the pillow.

Then she lifted her chin, pulled the lever to move her bed into a sitting position, and waited with determined lips for the doctor to come in.

But someone else came in first.

"Psst!" Two sets of eyes appeared in the crack between the door and the doorjamb.

She blinked at them – then, as the door swung in, and the eyes' owners darted into the room, she gaped. "Ami? _Rei_?"

"No need to sound so surprised, Serena," said Ami, looking a little bashful as she tiptoed closer to the bed. "How do you feel?"

"You _look_ HORRIBLE," Rei declared, plunking herself down on the chair beside Serena's bed. Her crutch was gone.

"You wouldn't look good if you'd had eight bones broken by a speeding drunk driver either, Rei," said Ami reprovingly, and she touched Serena's hair gently.

"Oh," said Serena, with relief. "He was drunk?"

"Like it makes a _difference_!" Rei pounded the arms of her chair. "Why do you sound so happy about it? He practically killed you!"

"Yes, but if he was drunk it wasn't on _purpose_," said Serena. "If he'd done it sober, that would mean he really hated me."

Rei considered this for a moment, one eyebrow going up and down as she pondered. At last, she shook her head. "Well, _I_ hate _him_."

Serena ducked her head. She knew that she shouldn't feel good about her friend hating someone, but she did. "Thank you."

"He deserves whatever he gets," said Ami, lips compressed. She touched Serena's cast lightly. "But Serena, really, how do you feel?"

Serena smiled at them. "Really good."

Rei squawked. "That's bull, look at you! You look like the crypt keeper." She leaned forward in her chair, pulling a rolled-up newspaper from her purse and waving it around. "I understand that Shields practically saved Roppongi singlehanded and all, but he couldn't have driven you home afterward? I mean, you help him bust a freaking drug ring but he can't be bothered to spare you half an hour to – "

Ami's eyes widened suddenly; she darted to the window. "My mom's coming!" she hissed.

Rei's eyes snapped wide. "We'll be back!" she hissed at Serena, and together, she and Ami sprinted to the door and darted out.

Serena blinked in confusion once more – but she had barely any time to sort out what the heck Rei had been talking about, because the door opened again, and two women walked in. One was slender in a white doctor's coat, the other taller and curvier in a sweater and skirt.

"Hello, Serena-san," said the doctor. Serena's eyes roved her face

"Hello," returned Serena politely. Her eyes roved the doctor's face uncertainly, noting the crisp black hair that waved around it and the delicate features. "Are you Ami's mom?"

Mizuno-san looked very serious. "I am," she said. "I wish that we could have met under happier circumstances."

Serena flushed guiltily beneath the ointment caking her face. Did Mizuno-san think the same thing that her parents did about her going to Roppongi? What if she didn't let Ami be friends with Serena before. "I'm sorry."

"That is not what I meant. I meant that it was unfortunate that you were injured. You have nothing to be sorry for, Serena." The doctor's voice was firm. "Alright?"

Serena looked up, met Ami's mother's eyes. She nodded. "Alright."

"Ah," said Mizuno-san as she saw Serena's wince. "No nodding for now. You may not have noticed, but you have currently have eight stitches in your scalp, Serena-san."

"Wow, really?" Serena blinked. "Eight stitches and eight broken bones." She smiled a little at the coincidence.

Dr. Mizuno eyed her with a cocked brow. "I would ask how you found out that you have eight broken bones – or rather, who you found it out from – " Her eyes flicked down to the folded newspaper lying next to Serena's arm. Rei must have forgotten it there in her haste to hurry from the room, Serena realized with a wince. " – but I think I already know."

She paused, went to the foot of the bed. "Give me a moment to read this, please." She lifted the chart's clipboard and slid on a small pair of reading glasses.

Serena's eyes slid from Dr. Mizuno to the auburn-haired woman who had accompanied her. She smiled gently at Serena and folded herself into the chair that Rei had occupied a few minutes ago.

"Were you reading the paper?"

"What? Oh." Serena looked down at the newspaper and lifted it clumsily with her bandaged fingers. "Um…"

"It's very exciting, isn't it?" said the woman. "Like something from a movie."

Dr. Mizuno cleared her throat. The woman smiled at Serena and shifted her eyes to the doctor; Serena followed suit.

Dr. Mizuno slid a penlight from her coat pocket. "I'm going to shine this into your eyes, Serena."

Serena obligingly sat very still, trying not to squint as the harsh beam of slight made her eyes, first the right, then the left, water.

"Hmm," said Dr. Mizuno. She sat back, clicked off the penlight and put it back in her pocket. "Why don't you tell me what you remember happening to you, Serena?"

Serena blinked her eyes, chasing the faint film of water away. "I…well, I was walking."

Dr. Mizuno nodded encouragingly. Serena's eyes flicked to the auburn-haired woman; she was nodding, too.

"I slipped," said Serena. "I do that a lot. I fell on the ice, and my locket came off. It fell in a storm drain on the street. There weren't any cars coming, so I went into the road to reach for it."

Reliving the memory aloud, she felt quite acutely how stupid they must think her. Who would lie on their stomach in the middle of a street to get a cheap piece of metal out of a gutter?

"But my arm got stick in the grate. I tried to get it out, but then… I saw Seiko's car coming at me."

The memory of his headlights careening toward her in the darkness collided with her memory of what Rei had said, and her eyes went wide, her mouth dry.

"I should be dead," she realized aloud. Her eyes went to Dr. Mizuno, bewildered. "How am I not dead?"

Dr. Mizuno set down her chart. "I think that would be thanks to this." She bent, picked up something from the floor at the foot of the bed, and held it up for Serena to see.

It was a clear plastic box, its sides smeared with reddish-brown, and inside it huddled a heap of torn black fabric. Just barely Serena could see a glint of silver thread.

"The car stopped in time to prevent any skull fractures or penetrating head injuries, but you still had copious bleeding from a cut made by a hood ornament on the car," Dr. Mizuno said. "You would have bled to death long before the ambulance arrived if your head hadn't landed on the jacket after the car hit you. The leather was heavy enough to staunch the blood flow from the wound until the EMS got to you. You are a very lucky girl, Serena."

"…" Serena stared at the box for a long moment. Her throat was tight and constricted, as though a cast encased her neck as well as her limbs.

Something white crossed in front of her eyes. Startled, she focused on it, only to realize that it was her arm, lifting toward the box with the jacket.

Dr. Mizuno placed it in her lap. Serena opened the lid and brushed the stuff, blood-crusted leather with her finger.

The auburn-haired woman leaned forward, smiling gently. "You parents gave that to you?"

"No." Serena gave a short laugh as tears began to crawl again from her eyes. "They gave me the locket."

For a moment, neither the woman nor Dr. Mizuno said anything. Serena's fingers found the silver wolf patch and tried to scrape the gunked blood from its proud muzzle.

"Well." The auburn-haired woman spoke up, leaning forward. Serena's eyes flicked to her. "Serena, you're probably wondering why I'm here."

She looked very solemn. Serena stopped picking at the patch and began to nod – quickly stopped. "Yes, ma'am," she said instead.

"My name is Sakurada Haruna," said the woman. "I'm a social worker from the Ministry of Welfare for Children and Families."

Serena's eyes traveled to Ami's mom. The doctor was watching her with that same quiet, watchful gaze that Ami often had.

She looked back to Haruna-san. "I…don't understand."

"You were in a car accident, Serena," said Dr. Mizuno.

Serena wasn't sure if it was a statement or a question. "Yes?"

"We receive many patients from car accidents," said Ami's mother. "The injuries are very recognizable to us – although your arm injury was certainly something new." She smiled slightly.

"The problem, Serena, is that you also had extensive bruising not congruent with car accidents. And on your X-rays we saw that you have had a lot of broken bones in the past. These injuries are very common in another type of patient we also see more frequently than we would like." Dr. Mizuno hesitated, seeming to search Serena's eyes for some sign of comprehension, but Serena was still confused. "Victims of child abuse."

Serena's eyes flew wide.

"That," said Haruna-san, "is why I'm here."

Serena stared at them. Her eyes were wide.

"I – " Her eyes darted to Dr. Mizuno, back to Haruna-san, to the door, back again. "My parents – they don't – "

"Serena," said Haruna-san gently. "It's okay to tell us. You're safe here. Okay? You're safe."

"No." Serena shook her head. Her voice was still jerking. "You don't understand – my parents – they don't – "

Haruna-san leaned back into her seat. Her eyes were still gentle. "Serena, it has been my experience that children often don't admit that they're being abused because they're afraid of their parents." She sat forward again. "Serena, we can protect you."

Serena was still shaking her head.

"It has also been my experience," Haruna-san's voice was quieter, "that children convince themselves that they are not being abused."

"I'm _not_," said Serena. Her knuckles were white as she gripped the box in her lap. "I'm not."

Staring hard at its lid, she heard Haruna-san stand up. "Okay," said the woman quietly. "But if you ever need to talk, Serena – " She reached into Serena's line of vision to slide a small white business card beneath Serena's fingers. " – you can call me, okay? My cell phone number is on there."

Without lifting her head, Serena gave a jerky nod. She heard footsteps, then the door clicking shut.

"Well." Dr. Mizuno cleared her throat. "In that case, your parents are waiting outside."

Serena lifted her head at that, and she was not sure what emotion Dr. Mizuno saw burning on her face, for the doctor said quietly, "You're still a minor."

Serena's fingers curled in Darien's jacket.

To her surprise, as Dr. Mizuno led her mother and father into the room, a uniformed police officer followed them in.

The dark-haired officer caught her glance as he walked in, and nodded his head at her with a friendly smile. Serena's fingers quickly snapped the box lid shut.

"_Finally_," said her father. "It's about time we were let in to see our own daughter!"

"Certain hospital protocols had to be followed," said Dr. Mizuno in a bland enough tone, but to Serena her cordial smile seemed icy. She bit her lip – made a sound of disgust as the foul ointment touched her tongue again.

"Ah," said Ami's mother, noticing. "Let's get you some water." She reached to press Serena's call button, but then she spotted the same thing Serena had: a water bottle poking from Serena's mother's purse. "Mrs. Tsukino, Serena could use some water."

Ikuko glanced away from her knit-browed study of the police officer. She turned slightly, looked at the wall behind her. "Of course you could, sweetheart! Where's the button to call the nurse?"

"I was referring to the bottle of water in your purse, Mrs. Tsukino," said Dr. Mizuno patiently.

"Oh." Ikuko's shaped brows rose for a moment, then she drew the bottle from her purse. She handed it to Serena. "Here you go, darling."

Serena swallowed as Ikuko reached out to smooth her bangs back, her manicured fingernail grazing the row of stitches that Serena could now feel sewn across her scalp. Before, she would have felt relieved, naïve enough to think that her mother had forgiven her, but the constant glances that her parents sent at the police officer were enough to show her otherwise. Dr. Mizuno had said that she was a minor; they had come because legally, they were still her guardians, and they would have been in trouble with the law had they not shown up. And that would ruin their image even more than a disobedient daughter…

She ducked her head, pulling away from her mother's cold fingers under the pretense of trying to unscrew the bottle one-handed.

"Here," said Dr. Mizuno, and opened it. "Do you need help holding it?"

Serena was flushing. "I can do it."

But her hand trembled as she lifted the bottle, and cold water splashed down her front.

Ikuko tutted, pulling her hand back. Dr. Mizuno silently held the cold bottle to Serena's lips. Serena, flushing, swallowed barely enough to banish the taste from her tongue before pulling away.

"Well," said the police officer, who was now regarding Serena's mother with the same unimpressed look she had given him, "I'd like to get started, if we could. The boy's already clamoring for bail."

"He better not get it," said Kenji shortly. "That scumbag nearly killed my daughter!"

"Yes, sir, I know," said the officer. "But your daughter has to give her statement." He looked at Serena. "Miss Tsukino, I'm Officer Hino. I'm in charge of the DUI case involving Mr. Seiko and yourself." His voice was kind. "Do you remember him hitting you?"

"Yes," said Serena. "It was his car, and I recognized the song. But – "

"See!" cut in Kenji. "There you go! He hit her! Now go charge him with attempted manslaughter!"

"What?" gasped Serena, so loudly that she made herself flinch. "No!"

The eyes of everyone in the room snapped to her.

Kenji's burned, looked livid.

Ikuko had her lips compressed. "Serena – "

Dr. Mizuno appeared thoughtful.

"Miss Tsukino," said Officer Hino. He waited until Serena's eyes met his. "Do you understand what that man did to you? From what Dr. Mizuno's said, you may never be able to walk on your right leg again, and you may not regain total use of your right arm."

Serena's lips parted. Her eyes flew to Dr. Mizuno. And then, when Dr. Mizuno would not look at her, her eyes fell to the casts covering her arm and leg. Her fingers clenched the corners of the box.

Then she shook her head. "No."

"Serena." Her father's voice had that threatening edge. "I want this boy put away. He's trash. He doesn't deserve to be around decent people."

Serena lifted her head. She could feel herself trembling, but in disbelief. Her father's perception of her had pivoted so quickly; she supposed she shouldn't be surprised that he could transform Seiko from hero to beast in a few seconds, either.

The disbelief boiled into anger that shook her palms; this sort of automatic judging was exactly what he had used to condemn Darien. And that fact in itself was enough to make her hate it, no matter to whom the judging was applied.

Her voice came out much stronger than she had expected. "That's not what you were saying a few days ago, Dad. If you'd known anything about Seiko, you wouldn't have tried to make me date him. You don't know _anything_ about him him. Stop trying to judge people you don't know anything about!"

Kenji's nostrils flared. "Serena Tsukino – "

" – is very tired right now," Dr. Mizuno cut in. "And in a lot of pain. I think it's quite clearly not the time for this conversation. I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask everyone to leave."

"Please." Officer Hino lifted a hand, cutting off both Kenji's and Dr. Mizuno's protests. "One more thing first."

He looked at Serena and pointed at the folded-up newspaper lying on her bed. "Did you read that?"

Without waiting for an answer, he continued. "I want you to think about something. I want you to think about those kids from Roppongi who helped bust that drug ring. I want you to think about what their lives must have been like, how hard it must have been for them to survive just one more day, every day. And I want you to think about how they risked their lives anyway. Then I want you to think about this kid Seiko who nearly killed you. I want you to think about how easy his life's been compared to theirs, and then I want you to compare what he's done to you to what they did for this city." Officer Hino lowered his hand and turned toward the door. "I'll be in touch, Mr. Tsukino."

Her father said something, but Serena didn't hear it, for a nurse had appeared and was escorting them out, and Dr. Mizuno was injecting something into the pouch of liquid that hung from the IV stand. Her vision was getting blurry.

But she picked up the newspaper from the bed with her heavy fingers, propped it on top of the box with Darien's jacket, and opened it to the front page.

**ROPPONGI GANG HELPS TOKYO POLICE BUST DRUG RING**

She had just enough time to see the huge picture of a man with ashy-colored hair being handcuffed by a police officer and read the caption _Officer Tadashi Kamiya restrains Black Moon Gang leader Diamante Nemes at the Makaiju Club after recording devices installed at his residence by rival gang members revealed the location of Nemes' drug storage_ before her eyelids floated shut and numb darkness reclaimed her body.

L

"…ridiculous implications! We've never laid a hand on her – "

Serena floated vaguely back to consciousness. The sound of someone angrily hissing rippled like a shadow above her in the water; then, like her head breaking to the surface, she realized that it was her father's voice.

She went immediately still, barely breathing beneath the thin hospital sheet.

"I should sue you for slander – "

Dr. Mizuno's voice, even quieter than her father's hiss, reached Serena's straining ears. "I welcome you to try, Mr. Tsukino. The evidence is overwhelmingly against you. Serena would be out of your custody before you could blink."

"Doctor, you are severely testing my patience – "

"Dr. Mizuno." That was her mother's voice, soft and smooth as silk. Serena tensed further yet. "If we abused Serena, why wouldn't she have told you or Ms. Haruna when you asked? Please answer me that."

There was a short second of silence. Serena strained her ears harder, biting so hard into her lip that she tasted salty blood instead of the horrible ointment.

When Dr. Mizuno spoke, her voice shook. "There are more types of abuse than just beating a child, Mr. and Mrs. Tsukino." Goosebumps ran down Serena's skin from the fury in her voice. "There is such a thing as emotional neglect and failure to thrive."

Her voice paused. "It's very clear to me that your image is very important to you. So I am going to give you instructions, and I am going to give you a warning. You will not lay a finger on Serena from now on. Not even to pick a piece of lint from her hair. You will not comment on her life, you will not interfere with it. You will let her see her friends like my daughter and Officer Hino's daughter Rei. A year from now, when she has graduated from high school, you will pay for whatever college she chooses to attend without argument. You do these things, and I will not call Sakurada Haruna at the Ministry of Welfare for Children and Families to tell her that I believe you have continued to abuse Serena. If you do not do these things, I will tell her, and I promise that the whole city will find out about your treatment of Serena. Have I made myself clear?"

There was a pause, this one longer than before. Then, her father's voice, grinding out. "Perfectly."

"Excellent." There was a sound, and light spilled into the room, over Serena's bed. Serena quickly shut her eyes and gave a little groan, cracking open her eyelids as though the light had just woken her.

"Good morning, Serena," said Dr. Mizuno, crossing to the windows and twisting open the blinds. Bright morning sunshine bounced inside. "You get to be discharged today."

Serena blinked against the light, squinting. Her eyes flicked toward her parents, standing stony-faced in the doorway.

"Your parents are here to sign the discharge papers," said Dr. Mizuno. "Then Rei wanted you to come over and have a _Charmed_ marathon with her and Ami. She asked me to tell you that they will be making spaghetti and meatballs to eat."

A laugh escaped Serena. Then another one. Until laughter and tears were both streaming from her in a steady, unstoppable flow.

Ami's mom helped her wipe her face and climb out of bed. "Come on," she said softly, helping her gently into the wheelchair waiting beside her bed. "Let's get you home."

L

Rei and Ami fussed over her that day until Serena felt like it was her birthday. It was hard to concentrate on the episodes they watched and laughed at, though, and not because of the casts that weighed down her limbs or the thought that she might never walk normally again or even the memory of what Dr. Mizuno had said to her parents.

It was the newspaper article that would not leave her mind. It dug its heels in there, and into its footprints seeped guilt. Certain though she was that Buji should not have been left alone without any idea of what his brother was doing or when he would be back, Serena kept remembering Darien's words. _"Everything I'm doing right now, I'm doing so that he'll be safe." _

That was where he had been that night that she went to Roppongi to help Buji. While Diamante Nemes was at the Makaiju Club – for Serena had seen him, had she not, had even _spoken_ to the leader of the Black Moon gang, that ashy-haired man – he and the others had been at the Black Moon's warehouse, bugging it.

Because even without what Rei had said, Serena knew, without doubt, that he and the other Wolves – Lita and Asanuma and Motoki, and who knew who else – were the ones to whom the article had referred. The coincidence of him being somewhere, doing something that was "_almost over,_" on the same night that the Black Moon's drug ring was busted by a rival gang was too great.

Which meant that she had torn into him after he had just risked his life.

The guilt and regret that filled her tasted worse than any ointment ever could.

"Okay, get up."

Serena blinked, eyes refocusing, and lifted her eyes from her cast to meet Rei's expectant face. "What?"

"C'mon." Rei jerked her head. Behind her, Ami was turning off the television and putting the DVD back into its case. "It's obvious you're mooning over Mafia Man, and you won't be able to actually contribute to the Charmed fun until you've gotten it out of your system. Let's go see him."

Serena's eyes flew wide. "You'd – ?"

"I've got a car, don't I?" Rei grabbed a pair of crutches from the corner of the room as Ami grasped the back of Serena's wheelchair. "And I don't have _these _in my way anymore. So let's go."

"But – " Serena twisted slightly, neck twinging, to look up at Ami. "I can't let you guys go to Roppongi!" Unconsciously she hugged the stiff leather jacket that had been sitting in her lap since she left the hospital. "It's too dangerous. I'll – I'll go alone sometime – "

"Seiko's car must have hit your head harder than we thought if you think we're about to let you walk into Roppongi alone," said Rei.

"Even if the newspaper reporter thinks that Shields-san's drug bust has greatly improved Roppongi's chances of decreasing the crime rate, we would feel much better if you let us come along," Ami translated. "So please humor us."

The drive to Roppongi was fun. Serena finally dragged herself from her funk, feeling horrible for ignoring the friends who had – granted, with the help of their incredible parents – saved her.

They had been saving her all along, she realized when she stopped to think about it. Rei had stepped in at the bonfire, Ami had first agreed to eat lunch with her, and then unquestioningly let Serena borrow her bike when she needed it. And even when she had been a bad friend, not paying attention to the TV marathon they had engineered to cheer her up, they hadn't gotten mad at her but instead were still helping her.

So, in a nest of pillows and with her leg propped across the whole backseat of Rei's Accord, Serena helped Ami shout down the rap music that Rei had cranked up until Rei gave in and turned it to a pop station. Then they all sang along trying to use different accents, and when soprano-voiced Ami attempted a growling Scottish brogue, Serena thought her arm cast might pop off because she was shaking so hard with laughter.

The happiness seeped back into the corner of her mind where she was still wondering what Darien would say when she showed up in Roppongi, and it tinted her imaginings bright and happy. With the Black Moon out of the way, he wouldn't be so scared and desperate, and he would never have to leave Buji alone again, and he'd tell her that and ask her to forgive him, but she would tell him that _she_ was the one who needed to be forgiven for what she'd said without being willing to listen to him, and now that Dr. Mizuno had threatened her parents and he was done with his police-assisting, they could be together so much more, and she could see Buji and Lita and even Asanuma, and introduce them to Ami and Rei –

"You said Fourth Street, right, Serena?"

Serena looked up as Rei abruptly turned down the volume of the radio. "Uh-huh," she said, wiping the tears of mirth from her face with her free hand. "Are we here?"

"Yes…" But Ami's voice was guarded.

Serena sat up straighter, ignoring the twinge from her leg, and looked out the window. There was the broken streetlight and the empty storefront with the alley beside it full of Dumpsters, and…as the car rolled to a stop beside the curb, she saw the side door that Lita had used, half-hidden behind a Dumpster. Saw that it was ajar, swinging slightly back and forth in the cold wind.

Serena scrabbled open her door.

"Serena, wait!"

But Serena lurched out of the car, just catching herself under her good arm with one of the crutches that Rei had put in the backseat with her before she could spill onto the pavement. She swung herself wildly, lopsidedly, through the morass of trash bags, toward the swinging door.

"Serena!"

A blue bandanna lay beside the doorstep, half-covered by a soft drink whose lid had come off and spilled its dark contents across the fabric. Serena stared at it for a moment, then into the darkness of the yawning doorway.

She steadied herself on one leg for a moment, and pushed the door the rest of the way open with her crutch.

"Hello?" she shouted. "Darien!"

Silence.

She rocked across the threshold. "_Lita_!"

Silence. Her eyes were burning again.

"Buji?" It was a whispered question, inaudible because she knew that if they were there, they already would have answered.

" 'ey, 'ey, wussallthis?" In the dark shadows something shifted.

Serena lurched backward as hope lurched her heart forward.

Then the lights switched on, and the room jumped out at Serena. The room was nearly bare. The couch she could remember Asanuma perching on like Spiderman was shoved against a wall, a lamp lay broken in pieces on the floor, and a shopping cart full of old bags was parked beside it. Other than that, the room was empty except for –

" 'ey…I remember you!" The gaunt, whiskery hobo who had talked to Lita from a bed of trash bags in the alley was not sitting up on the couch, squinting against the lights he had just turned on. He grinned at her. "'eard you beat up some junkies. What 'appened t'you, they come back for revenge?"

"What?" said Serena. Her heart was beating fast. "Please. What – what happened to the people who lived here? Darien and Lita and?"

"Them?" The hobo scrunched up his stubbled face. "Left, I guess. Door was open and the lock all busted up when I came back to the alley last night. Stuff's all gone, so I figured they musta moved." He winked at her. "Good timin', too. Been gettin' real cold outside, y'know?"

"But…" Serena had conceived so many scenarios of their reunion on the way to Roppongi. The idea that everyone would be _gone _had never been one of them. "But!" She could feel herself beginning to cry and champed down, hard, on her tongue to kill the tears before they began. "Where did they _go_?"

" ow'm I s'posed t'know?" The man shrugged, sounding indignant. " 'ey, you got anythin' to eat?"

"_Serena_!" A hand grabbed Serena's shoulder, and she fell backward a step, toward the door. "What were you_ thinking_ – "

" 'ey, watch out, lady, she beat up a junkie," said the hobo, but Rei was already pulling Serena out the door.

"Haven't you been almost killed enough times?" she demanded, catching Serena as she stumbled with her crutch back into the alley. "We didn't come here with you so you could go in _alone_!"

Ami caught them both. "You wouldn't want witnesses to your romantic reunion, either, Rei."

A laugh escaped Serena. So did a few tears.

Ami noticed at once. "What happened? Rei, what did you do?"  
"Me?" exclaimed Rei. "I saved her from the hobo that was lurking in there – " She cut off suddenly. "Oh…"

"Oh, Serena…" An arm encircled her. "He wasn't there?"

Serena pressed her face against Ami's shoulder, letting the fabric of her jacket soak up the leftover tears.

Another arm joined Ami's. "Come on," said Rei in Serena's ear. Her voice was rough. "Let's go home."

They helped Serena back into the backseat, and Serena managed to smile and laugh at the jokes they made to try and cheer her up, but echoing in the back of her mind as she hugged the blood-encrusted leather jacket close was Buji's voice.

_"Home is where Darien is."_

L

The door opened. The man holding the doorknob looked down at her and sighed. Then he opened the door wider and made a motion with his hand. "Come in, then."

Serena hobbled through the doorway, swinging herself clumsily into one of the plastic chairs that sat in front of Detective Kamiya's desk. She propped her crutch against her knees and watched the gray-haired man, who was much more clean-shaven now than the last time she had seen him, standing beside a phone booth at a shopping plaza, sit down behind his desk.

The detective picked up a pen and clicked it with his fingers, watching her with an expression that the past few days had taught her to recognize as pity. Then he put the pen down and leaned forward.

"I'm not gonna lie," he said. "I figured I'd end up seeing you in here some time or other. Though…" He hesitated, glancing at her casts. "Not in this condition."

Serena ignored his question. She hadn't fought all the way to the police station on a crutch and then argued with the officer at the counter for an hour so that she could tell this man about her encounter with a drunken teenager's car. "Do you know where they went?"

He sighed and picked up the pen again. Set it back down. "I don't."

"_Don't_ – " Serena's anger bubbled up through her mouth. She caught herself, lowered her tone. " – lie to me. How could you not know – "

He cut her off. "Miss, have you ever heard of witness protection programs?"

Serena stared at him. Her heart liquefied and poured into her toes.

Kamiya leaned back in his chair and rubbed the bridge of his nose with both hands. "Darien took a very dangerous risk by agreeing to help us." He lowered his hands and looked at Serena. "Do you know what he did?"

"He bugged the Black Moon's warehouse for you." Numbly Serena repeated what she had read in the newspaper. "So you could get taped proof of their involvement in the drug ring and bust them."

"Yeah…" Kamiya nodded slowly. "He did that. The second time."

Serena regarded him steadily, though her pulse had begun to pound as loudly as the music at the Makaiju Club.

"Those drugs that Nemes distributed went all over Roppongi. But mostly? They went to kids. They ended up in the high schools, the junior high schools, with girls willing to sell themselves to get some, with boys willing to kill to get some, with people willing to sell their kids to get some. We found one of the Black Moon's warehouses about two months ago. But we didn't have any solid proof it was theirs because we couldn't get a warrant from the judge. I knew the drugs were there, Darien knew the drugs were there, but we couldn't go in that warehouse until the judge had signed our warrant, and he wasn't gonna sign it anytime soon.

"I told Darien, I sai, 'You gotta wait, kid. Gotta do this by the book, we'll get him next time.' He was pissed. Said if I didn't stop that shit from getting out to the streets, he would." Kamiya snorted and rubbed his eyes. "He did, too. Took his Wolves and snatched that drug shipment right out of Nemes' warehouse before he could get it to the dealers."

Serena remembered the white packages she had seen in the room when she went to Roppongi on her own to return Darien and Lita's clothes. "Oh…" Her eyes narrowed in thought, and she looked up. "And they knew that Darien did it, didn't they? That's why he got in that knife fight with them."

"They suspected," said Kamiya. "They weren't sure. But see how much more dangerous that made it for him? The Black Moon was already keeping an eye on him. If Nemes had decided Darien was the one who stole his drugs, there wouldn't have been enough left of him – _or_ his little brother – to put in an envelope. Darien knew that. He started hesitating. Didn't want to risk anything happening to Buji."

Kamiya pinched the bridge of his nose again. "I convinced him to give it one more try. I needed him. I'd been working on the Roppongi ring for eight years, and for the past six of 'em, I didn't have a budget for me to get help. I needed him, you see?"

Serena didn't say anything. She heard in the detective's tone that he was looking for acceptance, for her to reassure him that how he had used Darien was okay.

She wasn't going to tell him that.

Kamiya gave a bitter laugh. "I begged the commissioner to keep the Wolves' role in the drug bust a secret. Honest to God, miss, I got down on my knees and begged him. But he thought that the public finding out that Roppongi residents had risked themselves to help the city would be a big morale-booster. So I had to do what was best for Darien."

Serena's eyes were widening, her chest constricting as the detective's meaning trickled into her. "You didn't tell him…" she breathed. In her mind, like a video on fast-forward, sped the memories of Darien's actions, his expressions, his words, and nowhere did she see – "He had no idea!"

"Miss – "

"No!" Serena spat. "You took advantage of him and tortured him and made him endanger his family, and when you were done with him, you ripped him out of his _home_!"

Her fist was clenched and shaking, her chest heaving; she breathed harshly and glared at Kamiya.

He spoke quietly. "I think you knew Darien better than that. He wasn't a stupid kid. He knew going in what the consequences might be – "

"No!" Serena threw her hands over her ears. "He wouldn't have helped you if he knew!"

But that was a lie, and she knew it. Just like telling Darien that she was angry with him only because he had left Buji behind had been a lie. She had been angry that he left her behind, too, totally clueless to his whereabouts. And she was refusing now, to believe what Kamiya said, what she knew was true because Darien would do anything to give Buji a better life than the one he had had in Roppongi – even let himself be used by a cop and taken away from Roppongi – for the simple reason that she didn't want to think that Darien had been willing to leave her.

She lowered her hands from her ears and bit her lip. Hard.

"Miss." Detective Kamiya leaned forward and met her eyes. "I regret approaching Darien. Really, I do. What I asked him to do caused him a lot of pain. Just from that time I saw you with him, I could tell that you meant a lot to him. And I know that leaving you had to have caused him a lot of pain.

"But I have to tell you that I think that everything that has happened is better for Darien in the long run. Wherever he is now will give him the chances he deserved. A boy like – " He stopped. "A _man_ like that was being wasted in Roppongi."

He fell silent.

Serena swallowed. She looked at her hands.

At last, she nodded. "I know." She stood, bracing herself with the crutch, and tried to bow. "Thank you, Kamiya-san."

She straightened and limped toward the door without looking back.

But just as she reached the doorway, he blurted out – "Miss!"

Reluctantly, an inch away from ignoring him and just hobbling away as quickly as she could, Serena looked back over her shoulder.

But Kamiya-san looked consternated now that he had called out to her. "I – well – you might see him again. Someday."

But his voice held no conviction. Serena nodded and exited the room.

L


	5. Chapter 5

A/N: As I said last chapter, this story totally mutated from my original expectations. I thought it would basically be a fun-and-games romance. But I kept picking and picking at the characters like an annoying four year-old, and I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised when they finally snapped and shoved their innards at me, their innards were bloodier than I had expected.

I won't apologize for that change, I guess – because after all, everything's _subject to change_, ha ha – but I apologize for any clumsiness in the execution of the story and also express my empathetic disappointment in the story's veer toward angstiness. Believe me, I wanted it to a nice simple and yummy romance too!

I'm pretty sure Jade-Eye also wanted it to be a yummy romance. Which makes her benevolence in posting the story and helping me with it all the more awesome and selfless. Thank you, Jade!

Disclaimer: I don't own Sailor Moon. Is that subject to change?

L

Leather and Lockets

Epilogue

L

"I can't believe that as soon as we get done with school forever, you head back INTO school, Serena." Rei readjusted Serena's laptop bag on her shoulder as they stopped in front of the train that would take Serena to Hokkaido. "Jeeze, Meatball Head, do you have one laptop in here or two?"

"Actually, Rei, you're the only one who's done with school forever," Ami pointed out, setting down her share of Serena's bags, a wheeled suitcase. "I'm heading to medical school, in case you forgot."

"She would have to be a HORRIBLE friend to forget a thing like that." Serena put down the duffel bag she was carrying. She readjusted her weight on her cane as she exchanged a grin with Rei. "I mean, you only reminded us – "

" – every time we tried to keep you from studying," finished Rei.

"And how many times was that, Rei?" asked Serena in a solemn voice.

"I believe it was every day, Serena," answered Rei with equal sobriety.

Ami cracked a smile, shaking her head at the two of them. "It was not."

"Was too!" declared Serena. "You left us alone so much that now Rei and I are finishing each other's sentences, see?"

Rei bopped Serena on the head. Serena grabbed Ami's arm for support and rapped Rei in the knees with her cane.

"And see?" said Rei, scowling at Serena. "We're starting to act like The Two Stooges."

"But we _should_ be the Three Stooges," said Serena.

They all went quiet for a moment.

Serena was the one to break the silence. "Anyway, Ami. There's zero chance that any of those Americans at Harvard being smarter than you, so take a break from studying when you get there, okay?" She leaned in and gave her friend a tight hug.

"Speaking of zero chance," said Rei playfully, "Who ever would have thought that Serena would become a teacher? And a science teacher, no less!"

Serena smiled. _"Magnesium and oxygen are like you and me, right? Total opposites. Positive charge and negative charge. But they come together and stick."_ The memory had faded over the past five years from a tear-salted sad to a smile-tempered bittersweet.

Ami laughed. "Rei, you're just jealous because Serena did something so unpredictable while you and I are just following in our parents' footsteps."

"Following in their footsteps?" scoffed Rei. "I'll be fifty times better than my dad. Just wait, by the time you guys come back to Tokyo I'll be city commissioner."

Serena grinned. "Oh yeah?"

"Hey, if I can become friends with a meatball head like you, anything can happen," Rei retorted.

Ami rolled her eyes. "Five years and you still haven't been able to come up with a more creative nickname, Rei?"

"There _is _nothing more creative than 'Meatball Head,' Miss Bluenette – "

"Oh!" Serena's sniffled moan broke up the bickering. Rei and Ami whipped around to look at her, arms outstretched as though to catch her from one of the tumbles she frequently took. She tried to smile at them, her eyes blurry with tears. "I'm really gonna miss you guys!"

"Of course you are, you meatball head," said Rei, tossing her head, but her voice was trembling, too.

"It's going to be so lonely," hiccupped Serena.

"So don't go," said Rei in a choked voice. "If you stay we can persuade Ami to go to KO University instead of all the way to Yankee Land – "

"You guys!" protested Ami, but suddenly she was crying with Serena.

Then Rei was crying too, and Serena and Ami's tears spilled faster, and then they were all hugging fiercely, and Serena's cane got knocked out of her grip and clattered to the station floor, but it didn't matter because just as they had been for the past five years, Rei and Ami were there, keeping her from falling.

L

Marie-san, Ami's mom, had warned Serena that Hokkaido, as Japan's northernmost island, would be much colder than she was used to. Serena had dressed accordingly in a sweater top and pants much warmer than she would usually have worn in September. But when she stepped out of the taxi that had driven her from the train station to the academy that would be her new home and workplace, she discovered that the chill air cut through the sweater's fabric like scissors through tissue paper.

Normally she would have pulled a heavier sweater on. But she felt so lonely in this new, isolated place where she knew no one and no one knew her. The child who had run up to meet her taxi and lead her to her set of rooms had been adorable with silky black hair like Rei's cut in a pageboy like Ami's, and homesickness had washed over her. Anxiety had engulfed her, though, when she noticed the glances that the child kept stealing at the cane she used to limp down the hallways. What had she been thinking, to come here all alone? she asked herself.

So instead of another sweater, she pulled from its special spot in her suitcase the leather jacket that had accompanied her to college, to Hong Kong when she and Rei had participated in the foreign exchange program, to Paris when Marie-san took all three of them during the spring vacation. It was softer, and a little smaller than it had once been, and the wolf-patch was beginning to peel away from the leather at the edges, but when she put it on she remembered why she had come here, all alone.

When she had seen in the newspaper a job listing for a science teacher willing to live and work with students at a boarding academy established for orphans in Hokkaido, her thoughts had flown immediately to Buji. As a junior in college, struggling to figure out what she wanted to do with her life, it had been memories of him that had finally reassured her that she wanted to be a teacher, the kind that students could come to for help, the kind that would be willing to help when they did. Here, helping with weekend game days and video game clubs and homework sessions and bedtime stories, she would be able to fulfill that dream.

Shoulders straightening beneath the jacket, she closed her suitcase again and made for the desk, where her employer, a Mr. Endo Xiao, had told her in his last e-mail that a sheaf of papers would be waiting for her when she arrived.

There was indeed a sheaf of papers waiting for her, along with a cellophane bag tied clumsily with a ribbon. Serena studied it curiously, peering through the blue cellophane, and saw that it contained a plethora of mini Cloud Nine Bars and chocolate truffles. A smile broke across her face; if the children here were so nice as to put together a welcome bag for her, certainly she wouldn't have any problems.

She popped one of the dark chocolate truffles into her mouth as she began to skim the papers left for her. On top was a letter from Director Xiao, informing her that the papers below were just information about various rules of the school – the times for lights-out for the various age groups, which ages and genders of children were on each floor, the times for her classes with class rosters, club information, etc., – which she could read at her leisure. It went on to say that her arrival coincided with the end-of-summer party that was held each year in the backyard with grilling and games and that he, Director Xiao, was hoping to introduce her to the students there.

Serena glanced at her watch. The letter said that the party went from three until eight, and it was half past four now. Rei had promised to call her at five, as soon as she got off her first day of work, and it certainly wouldn't do to have her phone ring right in the middle of her first conversation with her new employer. She decided to explore the main building until Rei called her, then go out to the party.

As she explored, had she not already read in the informational brochure sent to her by Mr. Xiao that the academy had previously been a hospital, she might not have realized it. The halls were floored in plain tan tile, but the hallway walls were plastered with posters of everything from Pokemon to L'Arc en Ciel, and socks and hair bands and toys lay every few feet along the floor. Serena picked them up as she explored the first two of the six residential floors, returning them to the common room at the center of each floor – where, she imagined, the nurse's station had probably been when the building was still a hospital.

The floor where her set of two rooms – a living room and a bedroom – were located appeared from the wealth of anime, Maaya Sakamoto, and young male idol posters plastering its walls to belong to the pre-adolescent girls, and Serena wandered it for longer than she had her own rooms, studying the posters on the doors and trying to imagine what the girls to whom they belonged were like.

The entire second floor consisted of a library and study rooms, all of which were deserted. Serena marveled at the sheer number of books present, wondering how Director Xiao had managed to get a hold of so many when she had read in the brochure that the academy had only been open for three years. But her attention was quickly distracted by the humungous window that stretched across the whole back wall of the library.

She limped through the maze of mismatched armchairs and study tables to the window seat that lined the window, leaning against it as she looked out. Stretching out before her was the sprawling backyard, complete with basketball courts, a soccer field, a playground, and lots and lots of kids.

Serena smiled at the sight of them all, running around, jumping rope or dancing or helping set up tables or dumping sticks into a pit that was quite obviously meant to become a bonfire.

She watched the boys helping with the campfire, for one of them had bouncy curls that reminded her very much of Buji, but his hair was blonde like Asanuma's.

Letting her gaze slide to the basketball courts, she saw that the group playing there consisted of older girls, not boys as she had expected. One of them was taller than all the rest and moved with a haunting grace…

Serena's brain nudged her. Suspicion and hope pricking her insides, she grabbed her cane and limped rapidly back to the elevator.

Just as the elevator panel beeped and lit, indicated that the elevator had reached the ground floor, Serena's cell phone buzzed against her waist. She fumbled for it in surprise, reaching into the pocket of her leather jacket and grabbing at her cane and trying to hurry out of the elevator all at the same time.

But her hands were trembling with excitement; the phone tumbled from her fingers and skidded across the tile of the floor outside the elevator doors.

She sighed, following its progress with her eyes, saw it come to a stop in front of a pair of tennis shoes.

Watched a hand reach down and pick it up. "Still dropping things, huh, Odango?"

Serena's body froze.

Only her eyes moved, creeping slowly up the hand's lightly tanned arm…to the neck with a lighter patch of skin where a tattoo would have been…to the earlobe with the closed hole where the earring would have been…

To the lightly scarred face.

A sound escaped her. Her cane shook beneath her hand.

He took a step forward, ready to catch her.

Serena shook her head, lurching forward. She didn't drop her cane, but he caught her up anyway.

And as she buried her face in his neck, his pulse fast against her cheek; as he gripped her tight, one of his beautiful cheekbones digging hard into her forehead, whispering fast, warm words that she felt instead of heard, a revelation spilled through her, as sweet as the filling from a chocolate truffle.

She was home.

L

The End


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